USA - Modern Architectures in History - Gwendolyn Wright - (Reaktion Books - Modern Architectures in History) (2008)

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m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e s i n h i s t o r y
USA
Gwendolyn Wright
USA
m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e s i n h i s t o r y
This international series examines the forms and consequences of modern
architecture. Modernist visions and revisions are explored in their national context
against a backdrop of aesthetic currents, economic developments, political trends
and social movements. Written by experts in the architectures of the respective
countries, the series provides a fresh, critical reassessment of Modernism’s positive
and negative effects, as well as the place of architectural design in twentieth-
century history and culture.
Series editor: Vivian Constantinopoulos
Already published:
Britain
Alan Powers
Finland
Roger Connah
Forthcoming:
Brazil
Richard Williams
France
Jean-Louis Cohen
Germany
Iain Boyd Whyte
Greece
Alexander Tzonis and Alkistis Rodi
India
Peter Scriver
Italy
Diane Ghirardo
Japan
Botond Bognar
Netherlands
Nancy Stieber
Spain
David Cohn
Switzerland
Stanislaus von Moos
Turkey
Sibel Bozdogan
R E A K T I O N B O O K S
USA
m o d e r n a r c h i t e c t u r e s i n h i s t o r y
Gwendolyn Wright
For Tom, with joy
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2008
Copyright © Gwendolyn Wright 2008
The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for the publication of this book by the
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Slovenia 
by MKT Print d.d.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wright, Gwendolyn
USA. – (Modern architectures in history) 
1. Modern movement (Architecture) – United States 
2. Architecture – United States – 20th century 
I. Title 
720.9'73'0904
isbn-13: 978–1–86189–344–4
isbn-10: 1–86189–344–2
Introduction
o n e
Modern Consolidation, 1865–1893
t wo
Progressive Architectures, 1894–1918
t h r e e
Electric Modernities, 1919–1932
f o u r
Architecture, the Public and the State, 1933–1945
f i ve
The Triumph of Modernism, 1946–1964
s i x
Challenging Orthodoxies, 1965–1984
s eve n
Disjunctures and Alternatives, 1985 to the Present
E p i l o g u e
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
7
17
47
79
113
151
195
235
276
279
298
305
307
310
Contents
‘Architecture USA’
stamps, 1982 issue,
showing Frank Lloyd
Wright’s Fallingwater
(1937), Walter Gropius
House (1937), Mies van
der Rohe’s Crown Hall
at the Illinois Institute
of Technology, Chicago
(1956), and Eero
Saarinen’s Dulles
International Airport
(1962).
American modern architecture is as lively and mutable as quicksilver.
Artists in every medium have delighted in the surprising play of forms
and types. Architects claim freedom and democracy as birthrights for
every citizen, sometimes presuming these are assurances rather than
aspirations. Popular culture has eagerly appropriated icons of modern
architecture and design without generating much respect for architects.
Praise has mixed freely with invective. The European avant-garde
lauded Midwestern factories and grain elevators as the magnificent evi-
dence of a new age. Americans were considered liberated from the past,
or ignorant of its lessons and beholden to commerce. New York remains
unfinished, impossible to pinion, simultaneously ‘a new Babel and a City
Divine’.1 Countless observers have deplored the vulgar consumerism of
Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami – then enjoyed their pleasures.
Modern office buildings and housing came under widespread attack in
the late 1960s, condemned as cold and callous or gaudy and ‘plastic’. The
most contemptuous critics may be those who denounce all aspects of
American modern architecture as a debased bastardization of ‘true
Modernism’, revering the European Modern Movement as the sole
incarnation of progressive values.
Can there be any coherence among these wildly divergent opinions
and the works they seek to describe? No single definition can encompass
the phantasmagoria of American modern architecture, but that doesn’t
mean that everything qualifies. The designation is stitched together by
ambitions, processes and effects more than any formal rules.
Modernism confronts contemporary life rather than seeking to escape;
it tries to redirect, improve or at least enliven present-day realities. The
goals extend beyond noble intentions about artistic innovation and
social progress, for we can no longer exclude the modernity of specta-
cles, self-promotion and profit incentives, even if they should not be
embraced wholeheartedly. The actors include world-renowned figures
but also relatively unknown clients and designers. Some are not archi-
tects at all, since professionals account for only about 10 per cent of what
Introduction
Joseph Stella, Battle
of Lights, Coney
Island, Mardi Gras,
1913–14, painting, 
oil on canvas.
gets built in America. I am suggesting an inclusive, dynamic and contest-
ed perspective, not a harmonious consensus.
A century of canonical histories has defined modern architecture in
terms of universal beliefs and forms, a worthy aspiration yet one dismis-
sive of the multifarious conditions in which all people operate,
including architects. We have recently become more aware of ecological
issues and the fact that ‘modern man’– the presumed beneficiary of well-
intended reforms – marginalized people who did not fit one model of
needs and desires. National and local cultures still seem problematic,
however, given legitimate apprehensions about xenophobic fervour and
provincialism. Yet nations remain salient factors even in today’s global
world. The materiality of building responds to formal regulations and
informal conventions. National imaginaries sustain shared notions
about the public sphere and private life, influencing even those who
want to challenge such norms. These configurations are never cohesive.
No formulas or essences, in other words, but definite patterns.
The Modern Architectures in History series considers such patterns
inside and across the boundaries of many nations. Each instance reveals
distinctive imageries and meanings that often reverberate elsewhere
once we know to look for them. The United States shared many qualities
with European Modernism: a commitment to social reform, confidence
in the sciences, a passion for new technologies and a pervasive fascina-
tion with ‘the new’. It appropriated from Africa, Asia and Latin America
as well in a flow of ideas, capital and people that was always multi-
directional. By the late nineteenth century, most of the world saw America
as the epitome of modernity, with architectural advances assuming a key
role in this mental construction: towering skyscrapers, rationalized fac-
tories, vibrant settings for popular culture, verdant parkways and
mass-produced, moderate-cost dwellings.2
Like all cultures, America’s is paradoxical. Traditions coexist with
innovations; utopian visions of the future with nostalgic fantasies
about the past – including earlier stages of Modernism. Americans
follow trends, yet they remain deeply suspicious of orthodoxies,
mindful of contingencies and unintended consequences. This inclina-
tion aligns with pragmatist tendencies, both the late nineteenth-century
philosophers William James and John Dewey, who asked what ideas
actually do in the world, and the less systematic predilections of count-
less others, including architects and designers, eager to tinker with (and
sometimes to transform) established practices. Such an approach tends
inevitably towards ‘patchwork’, but it is not inherently anti-theoretical.
As Jamesput it, ‘Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up
and sets each one at work.’3
8
In that spirit, this book unstiffens some familiar premises in order to
expand canonical histories, reframe customary narratives, unravel tan-
gled ambiguities. Such an unwieldy subject requires a clear structure.
Each chapter is organized around three realms of modern life: work
spaces, domestic spaces and public spaces – including infrastructure
linkages and urban/suburban design. Typologies provide an alternative
to more usual classifications based on individuals or stylistic trends.
They encourage a broader spectrum, juxtaposing exceptional buildings
with ‘minor’ or generic examples that history so often erases. Readers
can admire the impressive achievements of American modern architec-
ture, singular and collective, without denying destructive tendencies,
lacklustre replications and unequal access to modern improvements.
Cultural history reaches beyond the hermetic limits of a supposedly
autonomous ‘architecture culture’.4 Just as reformulations in other dis-
ciplines have affected design, so they provide fresh insights in my
conceptualization. For example, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory
traces the multiple, mostly unanticipated associations of humans and
‘things’ as agents in the world. An historian of science, Latour was think-
ing of microbes or information – but why not buildings?5
Too many architects and historians still insist that European émigrés
and their loyal American disciples brought Modernism to the United
States, as if in a suitcase, with the 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture at
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (moma). The chronology of this
book overturns that myth. American modern architecture has a much
earlier lineage beginning in the late nineteenth-century aftermath of the
Civil War, a struggle about unity and equality that engendered a full-
fledged modern nation with a transcontinental infrastructure, a
national economy, extensive industrialization, pervasive media and a
thriving consumer culture – all of which directly affected architecture.
A brief discussion about language helps clarify some of the conun-
drums.6 Modernism is a broad cultural phenomenon with striking shifts
in forms and intentions between (and within) different intellectual or
artistic domains. While these inevitably change over time, the word also
refers to specific radical artistic movements of the early twentieth century
– and to right now. Modernization is the mission of various specialists,
including architects, who viewed economic rationalization, standard-
ized norms and expanded markets as an inexorable historical trajectory.
The experience of modernity has elicited conflicting human responses,
exhilarating liberation but also materialism, alienation, a sense of loss
or foreboding. This makes it untenable to speak of a single modern
consciousness rather than passionate, contradictory and contentious vari-
ations. The modernist project envisions social amelioration through
1 0
radical change. Early certainties have disappeared, giving way to more
personal experiments and aesthetic games. A resigned nihilism now
seems to prevail; as the art historian T. J. Clark recently lamented, ‘The
modernist past is a ruin . . . our antiquity.’7 Fortunately, aspirations for
progress continue, responding to contemporary conditions, utilizing the
latest technologies while drawing upon what has come before. The mod-
ernist project still moves forward, seeking a more sustainable, equitable
and, yes, a more beautiful world.
If the history of American modern architecture is diverse and contra-
dictory, there are some clear consistencies. This book emphasizes five
interconnected themes, each resonant in today’s world. First, Americans
like to mix genres and sources. Terms like creole or mestizaje apply to
architecture as well as to language and physiognomy. Regional inflec-
tions have long infused American Modernism. Architects have drawn on
local vernaculars to reinvigorate the inevitable stiffness of official or
‘universal’ languages (as with literature at least since the fifteenth cen-
tury).8 Hybridity, once a term of disdain, has become a positive value,
whereas purity relies on exclusion. These qualities, so conspicuous in an
American context, remind us that creativity is always multivalent in its
origins as well as its consequences.
Second is the indisputable role of commercial culture, its effects often
crudely imitative, sometimes daringly inventive. Popular culture has
contaminated but also re-energized high art, infusing it with unexpect-
ed outside influences. The search for new markets frequently adopted
modern motifs, if only for their upbeat imagery. The private sector has
been dominant – especially wealthy clients, corporations and major cul-
tural institutions, which come under state auspices in most countries. As
a result, American architects have rarely enjoyed the authority of their
colleagues in other places. Not just clients, but businessmen and
bankers, merchant builders and marketing experts, politicians of every
stripe, an ambitious middle class of consumers, labour unions and
immigrants all have their say. These voices often collide with those of
architects or draw them into insidious webs of power.
Third, industrial production in the United States has accentuated
growth and diversity rather than uniformity, anticipating today’s ‘mass
customization’. This is especially true in the realm of housing, a funda-
mental concern in every instauration of Modernism. Designers have
experimented with production systems and modern materials ranging
from steel to synthetics and recycled timber. Like most Americans,
architects have typically embraced the latest technologies with enthusi-
asm, presuming them to be inherently positive, their reach
all-pervasive. The result has stimulated rising standards for human
1 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n
comfort, efficiency and individual self-expression – together with
relentless consumerism and inequalities.
The media have been a fourth influence, including both popular and
highly specialized professional publications or events. New currents in the
mainstream profession, the academic discipline and the self-declared
avant-garde have all been heavily mediated. Designers eagerly seized on
each new format: lithographs, photographs, mapping, cinema and digital
imagery. Advertising connected architecture with business, industry,
fashion and popular culture. Some individuals have made their mark as
celebrities – most notably Frank Lloyd Wright, who figures in every chap-
ter of this book until his death in 1959, and Philip Johnson, as arbiter and
architect since 1932. The media also enhanced the allure of verbal language
with labels, analogies and buzzwords.
Fifth and most auspicious is a long-standing environmental sensibil-
ity. Thoughtful site planning has enhanced many individual structures
and large-scale building groups. Many architects have accentuated nat-
ural landscapes and tried to mitigate ecological or climactic problems.
American Modernism has rightly been characterized as ‘Geo-
Architecture’, given how often it highlights surroundings, especially
dramatic sites, and fuses structure with infrastructure. Unfortunately,
the belief in the regenerative power of nature also tolerated a rapacious
Some of the archi-
tects featured on the
cover of Time from
1938, 1949, 1952,
1963, 1964 and 1979.
1 3 I n t r o d u c t i o n
disregard for land and ecological balance, as if these were eternal
resources.
Every history inevitably engages present-day circumstances. This book
raises questions about architecture in the twenty-first century even as it
analyses the past. Contemporary debates about ecologies, technologies,
patronage, symbolism and form build upon a lineage even as they go
beyond it. If today’s architecture seems inchoate, this is nothing new and
even potentially positive, since the tendency towards rigid dichotomies is
equallyingrained, each faction using the threat of the other to legitimate
its own narrowly self-righteous position. Neo-traditionalists deform his-
tory by evoking imaginary pasts and facile accusations that modern
architecture is inherently inhumane. Neo-avant-gardists likewise distort
reality, disdaining history and public opinion outside their own bubble,
rekindling suspicions of modern architecture as narcissistic indulgence.
But why should anyone have to choose between illusions of a return or a
rupture? The ‘excluded middle’ – what William James simply called the
‘in-between’ – is a fascinating and capacious realm to explore.9
A broader historical perspective will always challenge established
assumptions, but it will not undermine individual talents or distinctive
architectural concerns to place them in a larger context. My selection
emphasizes breadth and diversity, balancing major buildings, some
incontestable masterworks, with lesser-known trends and examples. I
have not hesitated to point out overlaps with the world of builders and
Hoover Dam (now
Boulder Dam),
Colorado (1928–38):
‘American “Geo-
Architecture”’, from
the Magazine of Art
(January 1944).
1 4
popular culture which determines the vast majority of what is built,
and with architects who were significant in their time but since forgot-
ten. Rather than simply describing stars I highlight constellations that
can be read in multiple ways and seen from different perspectives.
History is an ongoing and fluid process, not a sacred narrative. It can
illuminate alternative positions, so necessary within the homogenizing
forces of today’s global economy. This book is an effort to suggest myriad
influences, dominant tendencies and counter-currents, a maelstrom of
possibilities that sustains a vigorous culture. It would be foolish to deny
that American modern architecture has been a tool of power, and equally
foolish to see that domination as totalizing, as if change were impossible.
The options are never equal, yet the outcome is not predetermined. I
hope that readers will actively engage the broad currents and anomalies
of the past, and then draw upon this legacy to imagine new possibilities
in the present.
1 5 I n t r o d u c t i o n
Brooklyn Bridge 
opening celebration,
New York City, 1883,
lithograph.
The aftermath of the Civil War has rightly been called a Second American
Revolution.1 The United States was suddenly a modern nation, intercon-
nected by layers of infrastructure, driven by corporate business systems,
flooded by the enticements of consumer culture. The industrial advances
in the North that had allowed the Union to survive a long and violent con-
flict now transformed the country, although resistance to Reconstruction
and racial equality would curtail growth in the South for almost a cen-
tury. A cotton merchant and amateur statistician expressed astonishment
when he compared 1886 with 1856. ‘The great railway constructor, the
manufacturer, and the merchant of to-day engage in affairs as an ordinary
matter of business’ that, he observed, ‘would have been deemed impos-
sible . . . before the war’.2
Architecture helped represent and propel this radical transformation,
especially in cities, where populations surged fourfold during the 30 years
after the war. Business districts boasted the first skyscrapers. Public build-
ings promoted a vast array of cultural pleasures, often frankly hedonistic,
many of them oriented to the unprecedented numbers of foreign immi-
grants. Real-estate speculators built comfortable apartments and
oppressive tenements, while residential suburbs enjoyed a surge of
growth within or just outside city limits, touting bucolic pleasures and
the latest conveniences. Chicago’s John Root articulated the challenge
for architects: ‘The frankest possible acceptance of every requirement
of modern life in all its conditions,’ he wrote, ‘without regret for the past
or idle longing for a future and more fortunate day’.3 Americans lived in
the present, a realm of ever-changing and contested realities.
New technological connections intensified the pace of progress. Local
events could take on national significance almost immediately. Crowds
all over the country shared in the 1869 ‘golden spike’ ceremony that
marked the culmination of a transcontinental railroad. Ideas, images
and materials as well as people could now move quickly across the coun-
try, encouraging a more unified culture, although regional distinctions
and metropolitan heterogeneity continued to grow apace. The drive for
c h a p t e r o n e
Modern Consolidation, 1865–1893
systemic coordination would affect time itself in 1883 when the railroads
imposed the four standard time zones we know today, supplanting more
than fifty local variants. The telephone would further dissolve spatial
barriers following the first call in 1876 (the centennial year of national
independence), eventually connecting all would-be modern buildings.
Linkages could be simultaneously symbolic and practical. Steel sus-
pension cables allowed the Eads Bridge (1874) to traverse the Mississippi
River at St Louis. Young Louis Sullivan ‘followed every detail’, finding the
ideal modern ‘man in his power to create beneficently’.4 A decade later,
New Yorkers celebrated the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, a fusion of
steel cables and neo-Gothic piers that unified two cities into boroughs
of what had now become the nation’s premier city. Celebrants touted the
bridge as a beacon for immigration, a tourist attraction, an engineering
marvel. They audaciously asked: ‘Will New York Be the Final World
Metropolis?’ The critic Montgomery Schuyler called this ‘gossamer
architecture’ the leading monument of the age precisely because it was
not a palace or a place of worship, but ‘an exquisite refinement of utility
in which the lines of forces constitute the structure’.5 Electricity trans-
formed spaces, too, with urban crowds drawn by the dazzling lights of
some streets and urban entertainment venues, fuelled by Edison’s cen-
tral power stations. Electrified public streetcars transported a new social
category, the middle class, beyond the city limits.
Inexpensive media saturated America with images of these and other
spectacles. Pictures and texts about architecture attracted the general
public and all manner of competing producers. American Builder and
Journal of Art (founded in 1868) was joined by Carpentry and Building
(1870), American Architect and Building News (1876), Chicago’s icono-
clastic Inland Architect (1883), Architectural Record (1890), National
Builder (1885) and scores of others. Family magazines like Scribner’s and
Scientific American also analysed the latest trends. Pattern books by
architects and builders offered multiple house designs, urging readers to
alter and combine the suggestions as they saw fit. This coverage was part
of a larger phenomenon: the advent of postcards, comic strips, amateur
photography and omnipresent advertising. If the national appetite for
commercial illustrations elicited fears among the elite that populariza-
tion would subvert the standards of fine art, the population as a whole
delighted in the visual stimulation that surrounded them everywhere.
The architectural profession acquired its modern structure during
these years of cultural maelstrom. The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology offered the nation’s first professional classes in 1865, and ten
other schools followed in the next two decades, dispersing professional
training beyond the East Coast. The scene remained cosmopolitan since
1 8
German, British and Irish architects continued to wield considerable
authority across the country, and ambitious Americans still studied in
Europe, most often at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Anyone could
call himself an architect, so a resuscitated American Institute of
Architects (aia) joined other professional organizations to ostracize
competitors and command respect. Licensing exams in the 1890s con-
ferred state-approved credentialsand gave registered architects exclusive
rights over major public buildings. Most professional offices remained
quite small (as they do today), although multiple commissions in a few
firms required large staffs since corporate clients demanded speed, driv-
en in part by steep financing costs. As Daniel Burnham told Louis
Sullivan in 1874, ‘my idea is to work up a big business, to handle big
things, deal with big businessmen, and to build up a big organization.’6
Rationalized Business Structures
Rapid expansion and economies of scale fostered concentration of all
sorts, beginning with the railroads, then mergers and the emergence of
large corporations – modernity’s
most powerful clients and economic
arbiters. Businesses large and small,
including architecture, calculated
managerial practices and profit mar-
gins with far greater precision, in
part through ‘process spaces’ to facil-
itate more resourceful operations.7
Large-scale producers moved their
clerical and administrative employees
into downtown ‘headquarters’, away
from the gritty world of factories.
Up-and-coming companies invested
in commercial architecture that
trumpeted prosperity, recognizing
that this could give them a distinctive
edge in a fiercely competitive laissez-
faire economy. Insurance companies
and newspapers set the pace, fol-
lowed by otherwise conservative
banks, since their growth thrived on
fears and excitement about change.
In the words of the pre-eminent
business historian Alfred Chandler,
Frank Furness,
Provident Life and
Trust Company,
Philadelphia, 1876–9.
1 9 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
‘Modern business enterprise’ became viable
‘only when the visible hand of management
proved to be more efficient than the invisi-
ble hand of market forces’.8
New York increasingly stood out, ‘part
Paradise,part Pandemonium’, in the words of an
1868 best-seller; ‘Order and harmony seem[ed]
to come out of the confusion.’9 In the 1870s, the
tumultuous world of speculative booms and
busts brought thousands of tourists to Wall
Street, the ‘engine room of corporate capitalism’,
whose ‘Robber Baron’ magnates were both
admired and despised.10 These circumstances
generated the first skyscrapers – still a quintes-
sential expression of modernity. A search for
‘firsts’ tends to obscure dynamic processes of
appropriation and adaptation, essential to any
innovation. Nonetheless, many contemporary
historians give the prize to New York’s Equitable
Life Insurance Building (1867–70), the flagship
of a company less than a decade old whose
assets set a world record in 1868.
The Equitable Building was certainly not a
‘proto-skyscraper,’ as some later historians contended, implying a teleolog-
ical course towards an inevitable outcome.11 The evolution of its design
instead fused modern concerns for cost-effectiveness with high-risk stakes
and publicity. Although one firm, Gilman & Kendall, won a competition
for the new building in 1867, Henry Hyde, founder and vice-president of the
company, immediately asked runner-up George B. Post to revise their
scheme, making it ‘rational’ – by which he meant that it should abide by the
cost guidelines while providing both higher rents and more rentable space.
Post complied in ingenious ways. Most importantly, following Hyde’s
lead, he incorporated two steam-powered elevators so all floors would
be equally valuable. (Elisha Otis had installed the first safety elevator for
passengers a few blocks away in 1857, but it was expensive and clumsy.) 
Only eight storeys high, the Equitable reached 43 metres, more than
twice as tall as comparable structures, for Hyde understood both the allure
of double-height ceilings and the emergent competition to create the
tallest structure. The building enjoyed immediate success when it opened
in 1870, drawing thousands of people to ride in the elevators and enjoy
what one newspaper called ‘the most exciting, wonderful, and instructive
view to be had on our continent’.12 Equitable continued to expand,
Gilman & Kendall and
George B. Post,
Equitable Life
Insurance
Headquarters, New
York, 1867–70.
2 0
although the nearby towers of media
giants like Western Union (designed by
Post) and Newspaper Row, congregated
east of City Hall Park, soon usurped 
its once-remarkable prominence. Pro-
motions for each new set of skyscrapers
would continue to tout a fusion of
rational constraints and exceptional
splendour in costs, height and visibility.
William LeBaron Jenney of Chicago
has been called the father of the sky-
scraper. Paternity claims rest on evidence
of iron-skeleton construction – a hidden
genetic code for Modernism – and a
desire for legitimate parentage. Thin
structural members support their own
weight and that of the floors; the outer
wall hangs on this frame, a curtain of nat-
ural light, weatherproofing and orna-
ment. Jenney’s Home Insurance Building
(1884–5) did use such a system, but only
on two façades, as an expert committee
ascertained in 1931 during the first stage of
the building’s demolition.13 The skeleton
frame evolved through multiple experi-
ments on diverse structures, including
Jenney’s Fair Building, a department
store of 1890–91. Figures like Jenney
reveal changing cultural biases. First seen
as archetypal American ‘inventors’, they
fit later historians’ critique of obliging practitioners who merely fulfilled
the will of powerful capitalists.‘The [Chicago] frame was convincing as fact
rather than as idea,’ Colin Rowe would contend,‘whereas [in Europe] it was
more often an essential idea before it was an altogether reasonable fact.’14
Astute late nineteenth-century critics like Montgomery Schuyler
understood that ‘Architectural forms are not invented,’ but evolve in
response to multifaceted, unpredictable shifts in business, technology and
culture.15 Successor generations of modernists instead promulgated myths
of a preternatural creative force, with Chicago akin to Renaissance
Florence. Siegfried Giedion’s book Space, Time and Architecture (initially
published in 1941 and known as ‘Giedion’s Bible’ for decades among archi-
tects) acclaimed what soon came to be known as the Chicago School – its
William LeBaron
Jenney, Fair
Department Store,
Chicago, construction
drawing with column-
and-beam detail,
1890–91, from the
Inland Architect and
Building News.
2 1 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
Modernism incarnate in the ‘constituent element’ of steel-frame construc-
tion – and dismissed New York’s towers as signs of frivolous ‘troubadour
spirit.’16 This limited vantage highlighted a few remarkable examples as
prescient exceptions to the American norm. They supposedly embodied
the Zeitgeist of their age because they anticipated later preferences. These
judgements denied legitimacy to most other structures, erasing them from
consideration. Architectural debate is still burdened by the narrow opposi-
tions that resulted from this purview: lonely exceptions versus evolving
norms, modern versus eclectic, progressive versus backward, pure spirit
versus contaminated amalgams.
Skyscrapers appeared in downtown areas – officially designated ‘cen-
tral business districts’ – where economic concentration and social prestige
combined with high property values. Downtown is a distinctly American
word and concept that originated in the 1880s, in clear contrast to the dis-
persed and variegated commercial districts of Europe. (The term down-
town only appeared in dictionaries in the early 1900s after several decades
of widespread colloquial use.) Spatial concentration intensified as more
companies demanded proximity to legal, financial and other services,
causing the price of real estate to increase dramatically, which then
encouraged owners to expand vertically. Venturesome investors antici-
pated future concentrations since the locations and boundaries of each
city’s downtown were highly volatile, especially in early years.
Chicago gained prominence when its commercial leaders rebuilt
quickly afterthe devastating fire of 1871, despite an ensuing economic
depression. The new downtown was known as the Loop, taking its name
from the surrounding cable-car tracks, re-inscribed by elevated trains in
the late 1890s. To this day, all major transit lines still lead to this area,
even though its prominence has declined markedly since the 1920s. The
Loop was concentrated, occupying a 1.3-square-kilometre area, hemmed
in by water and railroad yards. Crowds and congestion were seen as
assets, evidence of a vigorous economy. Tourist guidebooks promoted
itineraries of Chicago’s new skyscrapers, touting it as the world’s most
characteristically modern metropolis, the ‘City of Speed’.
Two Boston developers, Peter and Shephard Brooks, helped define
Chicago’s modernity. By the turn of the century they had financed 9.3
square kilometres of new office space, together with Owen Aldis, their
local manager. Combined with the other buildings that Aldis managed,
this accounted for nearly one fifth of the Loop. Peter Brooks explained
his specifications for the Monadnock Building (1884–91) to his architect,
John Root: a marginal site required masonry construction to reassure
clients, while economy and maintenance meant ‘no projecting surfaces
or indentations . . . everything flush, or flat and smooth with the walls’.
2 2
Root’s alchemy turned these constraints into creative architecture. Sheer
walls of deep brown brick rise sixteen storeys. The building’s effect
depended solely ‘on its massiveness and the correct relation of its lines’,
marvelled one local newspaper, and Schuyler described it as an essence,
‘the thing itself ’.17 Unfortunately, elegant minimalism is notoriously
expensive, and cost overruns were one reason that Aldis hired another
firm, Holabird & Roche, for an addition two years later.
Technological innovations provided essential underpinnings for the
modern skyscraper. Some went far below ground. Power-operated der-
ricks made deeper foundations possible; pneumatic caissons allowed
buildings to rise to more than twenty storeys high in 1890 – at which
Burnham & Root,
Monadnock Building,
Chicago, 1884–91,
with Holabird &
Roche addition of
1893 at left.
2 3 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
time Chicago and other cities began imposing height limits. Elevators
were prominent, but hidden systems of sewage, heating, ventilation and
plumbing were equally important, while advances in non-combustible
materials and sprinkler systems eased fears about fires. Whereas large
office buildings of the 1850s had housed some 300 employees, new sky-
scrapers might have 4,000 with several times that number of business
visitors per day. By 1890 the sequence of experimental construction pro-
cedures had coalesced into a pattern, still much the same today,
including general contractors with comprehensive schedules. Designed
to be replicated, the ‘Chicago system’ took root in Kansas City,
Cleveland, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Major changes in communications and record-keeping spurred a
sometimes desperate demand for skilled employees. Small offices accord-
ingly gave way to larger spaces and movable partitions. Business, only
recently an entirely male domain, now rapidly feminized, in part because
of pay disparities that continue today. New equipment like typewriters,
telephones and vertical filing cabinets helped generate a female clerical
force whose members became interchangeable elements arrayed in rows
in large central areas under the scrutiny of male managers.18
If office efficiency and rentability determined interior design, both
required access to natural light. Burnham and Root’s headquarters for
the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (1883) introduced spacious
light courts within large perimeter blocks. Chicago’s Reliance Building
transformed the office façade, converting most of its surface to plate
glass. The fourteen-storey building was erected in two stages. John Root
designed the ground floor (1890–91) with capacious windows set in dark
Female and male
employees in the
Metropolitan Life
Insurance Building,
New York, c. 1896,
postcard.
2 4
masonry; Charles Atwood, who replaced Root after his death, conceived
the upper floors (1894–5) quite differently, using glazed terracotta around
ample ‘Chicago windows’ consisting of tripartite bays with smaller oper-
able sashes to each side. Commentators of the era disliked the bright
white cladding as the embodiment of the ‘money-getting spirit of the
age’. Eighty years later, the Marxist architectural historian Manfredo
Tafuri concurred, calling it a pure sign of laissez-faire capitalism. More
formalist critics saw the cladding as a mirage; they read the exterior as a
transparent, virtually immaterial glass curtain wall, drawing in part on
Root’s early translations of Gottfried Semper, who had alluded to walls as
textiles, and therefore ‘an architectural anticipation of the future’.19
More than ever, Americans now worried that their aggressive busi-
ness culture might have negative repercussions, not just on architecture
but on the larger social order. Louis Sullivan was not alone in asking:
‘How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal
D. H. Burnham & Co.,
Reliance Building,
Chicago; base by John
Root, 1890–91; upper
floors by Charles
Atwood, 1894–5.
2 5 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
agglomeration, this stark staring exclamation of eternal strife, the gra-
ciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture?’20 Ornament
seemed an antidote, articulating higher cultural values over bottom-line
frugality, especially when the public could see it. The incised granite
bases of skyscrapers reasserted human scale and even a civic presence on
busy downtown streets. Grand entrances invited the public into hand-
some lobbies and interior courts where light filtered through the filigree
around stairs, cantilevered balconies and elevator cages.
Sullivan himself insisted on synthesis, fully integrating rich colours
and ornament (derived from studies of nature and geometry) in his elo-
quent office buildings. Three of Adler & Sullivan’s masterpieces are
outside Chicago: the Wainwright in St Louis (1890–91), the Guaranty in
Buffalo, New York (1894–5) and the Bayard in New York City (1897–8).
The Wainwright, fully ten storeys high, was the firm’s first steel-frame
structure. Sullivan claimed to have created the initial ‘logical and poetic
expression’ for skyscrapers in a ‘volcanic’ moment of inspiration.
Celebrating verticality, making ‘every inch a proud and soaring thing’, he
transliterated the classical concept of a tripartite column of base, shaft
George Wyman,
Bradbury Building,
Los Angeles, 1890,
light court.
Adler & Sullivan,
Wainwright Building,
St Louis, Missouri,
1890–91.
Wainwright Building,
plan of sixth (typical)
and first floor.
2 7 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
and capital into monumental scale: a tall, handsome base with public
lobby, ‘an indefinite number of stories’ for office rentals, and mechani-
cal equipment at the top, concealed behind a frieze whose vibrant
pattern was visible from the street.21 The lush ornament counterbal-
anced the elemental structure, providing a ‘life force’, which, Sullivan
believed, could neutralize the oppressive forces of capitalism. Famously
declaring that ‘form ever follows function’, he considered lyricism a fun-
damental human need, especially in a crowded, often alienating
metropolis. His was a ‘liberal, expansive, sumptuous’ Modernism, bring-
ing joy to ‘the daily life of our architecture’.22
Industrial architecture also favoured functional beauty, although,
given constant changes in use, adaptability was far more important than
visibility. Urban manufacturing surged in the 1870s and ’80s as small-
scale capitalists built hundreds of structures typically known as lofts,
renting out each floor for storage or small-scale industry, notably gar-
ment sweatshops. Larger companies soonhired well-known architects
to provide more specialized functions and aesthetic impact, notably in
urban wholesaling, which dwarfed retail in economic and architectural
terms throughout the 1890s. Marshall Field’s wholesale store in Chicago
(1886), designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, became an icon. The
headquarters for a prestigious business, its exterior majesty and internal
organization provided a stable point of reference not just for architects
but also for merchants and shopkeepers throughout the region.
Architects in other cities often emulated this example for relatively inex-
pensive warehouses, sturdy enough to support heavy loads, their
H. H. Richardson,
Marshall Field
Warehouse, Chicago,
1886.
Harry Wild Jones,
Lindsay Brothers
Warehouse,
Minneapolis,
Minnesota, 1895,
upper-level addition
1909; photographed
in 1990 following
renovation as River
Walk lofts. 
2 8
handsome restraint considered ‘a wholesome architectural influence’ at
the time.23 A century later, many of these handsome buildings were con-
verted into high-status residential lofts.
Housing the Emergent ‘Middle Class’
The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted expressed pleasure in
another geographical shift of the post-Civil War era, one that separated
‘compact and higher buildings’ in business districts from ‘broader, lower,
and more open building in residence quarters’ beyond the city limits.
Industrial Chicago (1891) likewise praised the 1880s for the new commer-
cial style downtown and the ‘modern cottages’ going up outside the city.24
Olmsted and Vaux’s 1868–9 design for Riverside, just outside Chicago,
created the first large-scale comprehensive design for a residential sub-
urb.25 Unlike patrician suburbs of the 1850s such as Llewellyn Park,
Riverside used skilful site planning to integrate natural beauty with mod-
ern technology – notably the inclusion of public transit with a railroad
station – together with adjacent shops and apartments. Almost half of the
650 hectares comprised dedicated public land, ensuring a lush bucolic 
Frederick Law
Olmsted with William
L. B. Jenney,
Riverside, Illinois,
1869, site plan. 
2 9 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
setting. William LeBaron Jenney
became chief architect and engi-
neer after 1870, designing a number
of eclectic houses and a hotel. Like
Olmsted, he was an environmental
strategist, gearing each building to
near and distant views. Frank Lloyd
Wright’s Tomek House (1907) and
Coonley House (1908) in Riverside
would reinterpret this tradition in a
daring new idiom.
The Riverside typology was an
eloquent ideal that few could
afford to match. Less expensive
streetcar suburbs attracted a mid-
dle-income market – indeed they
helped create the middle class.
Antebellum society had presumed
unchanging categories (the ‘vicious’
poor, ‘hard-working’ mechanics or farmers, the elite ‘best men’), giving
little thought to a vague entity sometimes called the ‘middling classes’.
The American designation ‘middle class’ emerged in the 1870s, marking
a heightened awareness of status among the fast-growing ranks of serv-
ice employees, clerks and professionals. If class depended on job and
salary, the right house converted these into a visible commodity.
Although most people still rented, home ownership rose as banks and
builders offered better mortgage terms. A more informal market
emerged for ambitious working-class families with ethnic-based build-
ing-and-loan societies underwriting workers’ cottages in Polish,
German and other enclaves close to urban industrial zones.26
Suburbia embodied and exaggerated the idea of separate gender
spheres, supposedly protecting women and children from the brutal
male world of commerce and industry. Yet here, too, we find alternative
currents. Intent on modernizing this female realm, in 1869 Catharine
Beecher published The American Woman’s Home, co-authored with her
sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A former art teacher, Beecher adapted sev-
eral dwelling types ‘with the latest and most authentic results of science
applicable to domestic life’. She focused almost obsessively on her sub-
urban model. It featured two full bathrooms, built-in furnishings,
movable partitions and a ‘workroom’ that concentrated plumbing,
heating and storage in a compact service core.27 In defining the home as
a virtually autonomous setting, the shrine of health and efficiency,
Edmund Quincy, Jr,
and Ware & Van
Brunt, Model Houses
for the Quincy
German Homestead
Association, Dedham,
Massachusetts, 1871.
3 0
Beecher endorsed what would later be called ‘family values’. Her ideal
home was strictly separated from the work of business, although not
from work as such, at least not for women. Giedion and others have por-
trayed Beecher’s ideas as premonitions of 1920s Modernism. In fact, her
remarkable scheme highlights an intriguing aspect of Victorian culture,
Modernism’s bête noire. The widespread appeal of Victorian homes,
then and now, is in part their ability to symbolize deep human longings
for familial and personal well-being while deftly incorporating the latest
provisions for convenience, comfort and health. Builders’ advertise-
ments routinely promised ‘a.m.i. – All Modern Improvements’ – or
higher standards for everyday life.
Even today, modern residential architecture in the United States draws
on four themes that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The first is
new media. The latest house designs were favourite topics in popular and
professional journals and early mass-market shelter magazines, which
focused exclusively on the topic. Second, modern technologies raised
Catharine Beecher,
frontispiece and 
floor plan of a model
suburban house, 
from The American
Woman’s Home with
Harriet Beecher
Stowe, 1869. 
3 1 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
standards for public infrastructure and household comfort. Site planning
is third. The Civil War made Americans keenly aware of the ‘environ-
ment’ as a potent cultural phenomenon and a prime determinant of
public health. Well-to-do suburbs set aside some open space and adopt-
ed a regular pattern of curving street layouts that seemed organic. Most
dwellings connected to the outdoors with one or more porches and long
verandas that in turn led to lawns or gardens. Finally and most pro-
nouncedly, American dwellings linked individualization with
standardization. Mass-market commerce still relies on surface images of
individuality, illusions of autonomy fused with predictable uniformity.
The post-Civil War era marks the birth of that entrenched American
belief that your home expresses who you are. Whereas antebellum domes-
tic architecture had stressed collective standards (variations were based on
climate and class), American houses now accentuated self-expression.
Street façades and interiors mixed materials in distinctive, eye-catching
patterns, while irregular massing supposedly signalled the distinctive
interests of those inside. In reality, of course, home-builders relied on
mass-market pattern books and popular
magazines for ideas. Clarence Cook, a well-
known New York art critic, declared zealously
in The House Beautiful that ‘there never was a
time when so many books and magazines
written for the purpose of bringing the sub-
ject of architecture – its history, its theory, its
practice – down to the level of popular
understanding as in this time of ours.’28
Equally important, stock fixtures and fac-
tory-made ornament allowed builders to
conjure up the effect of uniqueness at a rea-
sonable price. As American mass production
reached unprecedented output, it churned
out the appearance of personalized diversity
for dwellings, a precursor to contemporary
building practices. Only a quarter of most
suburban households in 1890 owned their
own homes (and half of these were owned
by mortgage-financing institutions), making
appearance all the more important an indi-
cation of status and stability.
‘Queen Anne’ was the most common
label for thesevariegated, supposedly indi-
vidualized houses, although builders and
Factory-produced
stair balusters from
Universal Moulding
Book (Chicago, 1871).
3 2
architects borrowed widely from French, Japanese and other English ver-
naculars and from their own New England Colonial houses. The
amalgams could be serendipitous or garbled (‘hallucination and morbid
delirium tremors’, fretted Scientific American).29 However, architecture
rarely fits into precise categories like pastiche or pure, traditional or
modern. The seductive ease of stylistic labels brings a semblance of order
to the messy vitality of art, science and politics, but it tends to dismiss all
sorts of creative work that do not fit into narrow classifications.
Besides, labels are often applied long after the fact. Art historian
Vincent Scully invented the term Shingle Style in the late 1940s to
describe the rambling, informal houses of the 1880s especially popular in
wealthy New England suburbs and resorts. Illustrations underscored
bold, asymmetrical compositions, a continuous flow of ‘natural’ shingles
(usually factory-produced) on the façades and a relatively open flow of
spaces inside – each one a stage for special everyday ‘events’. This trend
spread all the way to California and is often replicated today. A French
architect in 1886 extolled ‘an audacity which is astounding’, predicting
Joseph Cather
Newsom, designs
from his pattern-
book, Modern Homes
of California (1893).
3 3 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
that these imaginative yet restrained American houses could ‘lay the
groundwork of a more modern style’.30 Yet Scully was not content to
describe a phenomenon. Taking the rhetoric of the time far too literally,
he claimed an inherent and conscious meaning: the incarnation of an
American ‘democratic’ spirit.31 Past or present, architects and builders
rarely adhere to stylistic rules, much less mythic cultural imperatives.
Frank Lloyd Wright adapted these ideas for his own home and studio
in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park in 1889, when he was just 22 years old.
The principal façade features an exaggerated triangular gable atop two
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Wright house, Oak
Park, Illinois, 1889.
The Oak Park Wright
house, living-room
inglenook.
3 4
bay windows, the whole covered with shingles. This paradigmatic signi-
fier of shelter emphasized simplicity, even restraint; it also extended
beyond the private sphere. Following the tenets of Chicago progressives,
especially women reformers, Wright integrated work and family life
under one roof. (He also shared a Chicago office with like-minded col-
leagues for business meetings and collaborative discussions.) The bold
geometries continued inside, notably his refinement of a conventional
fireplace alcove as a series of interlocked rectangles around an arch. His
treatment of space would become increasingly assured and complex over
the next decade.
Modern systems of production and distribution underlay most
Victorian residential architecture. Domestic production of plate glass
after 1875 led to stock windows to fit stock window-sash. Portable prefab-
ricated houses were shipped from contractors, many of them in Chicago,
to American homesteads and overseas. Schoolhouses, churches, court-
houses, stores and taverns were also available. Most suburban and urban
houses were constructed in small groups from three or four to twenty at
a time, each one quite similar in structure and floor plan, but made to
seem distinctive with still commonplace devices like reversing the place-
ment of a porch or gable. The 1880s also saw a new breed of builder who
dramatically increased the number of dwellings and consolidated a
panoply of services. These ‘sub-dividers’ produced advertising; designed
and built dwellings; laid out street plans; financed transit systems; and
Advertisement for 
S. E. Gross’s
‘Enterprises’ in the
Chicago suburbs,
1889.
3 5 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
installed landscaping and infrastructure,
even when the standards were meagre.
San Francisco’s Real Estate Associates
built over a thousand row (terrace) hous-
es in one decade. Two architect-brothers,
Joseph and Samuel Newsom, produced
hundreds of custom-designed dwellings,
speculative row-house blocks and eleven
pattern books with titles like Modern
Homes of California (1893). Samuel E.
Gross surpassed everyone, laying out
more than 40,000 lots in 16 towns and 150
smaller subdivisions in and around
Chicago between 1880 and 1892. His ads
for houses and neighbourhoods appeared
in English and foreign languages, using
comic-strip art to assert the enduring
developer’s promise: happiness and pros-
perity in ‘your own home’.
Meanwhile, apartment buildings were setting off a ‘Revolution in
Living’, declared the New York Times in 1878.32 Large cities soon reported
thousands of multi-family residences under construction every year,
spurred by the rising cost of land. Working-class areas had distinctive pat-
terns, such as New York’s ‘walk-ups’ and New England’s ‘triple-deckers’,
with one family to a floor, though renters and boarders were common.
Apartment houses could be ‘cheap flats’ or more prestigious ‘French flats’,
so locations and façades had to ensure status. Interiors were visibly
ornate, sometimes awkwardly so, but certain forms of convenience were
an asset. By the 1880s, architects were experimenting with innovative
plans and technological advances such as gas lighting, elevators, central
vacuum-cleaning systems, telephone switchboard operators, central hot-
water heating and that American obsession, fully equipped bathrooms,
for every unit. Apartment-hotels upped the ante with centralized services
like professional laundries and kitchens to service individual units, as well
as dining rooms, cafés and reception areas on the main floor. Progressive
buildings added childcare and kitchen-less units. The feminist Charlotte
Perkins Gilman called this a boon for women, a model of cooperative liv-
ing, proof that Americans were willing to innovate, always ready ‘to throw
aside good for better, and better for best’.33
Apartment buildings thrived by transforming the image of multi-
unit housing from poverty to luxury. The New York courts helped,
ruling in 1878 that collective services distinguished apartment houses
Section of plumbing 
in a typical Chicago
apartment house, 
c. 1890. 
3 6
from tenements, since no one dared suggest ‘communistic’ efficiencies
for the poor. Philanthropists constructed suburban enclaves and a few
‘model tenements’ in cities. Both kinds of reforms were relatively con-
servative, based on small interventions, not grand architectural
‘solutions’. The site planning did make a difference, however, since large
parcels of land allowed for spacious central courtyards to maximize sun-
light, fresh air and common areas for the residents.34 These efforts
merged belief in the market with environmental determinism – the
notion that good or bad environments directly affect human behaviour
– an especially deep-rooted conviction in American culture. Model
housing presumed a twofold effect: better architecture would change the
bad habits of both residents and speculative builders.
Public Entertainment
American cities were segregating commercial and residential environ-
ments, yet urban social life retained a dynamic creole mixture. Despite
the fierce antagonisms that divided citizens along class, ethnic and racial
lines, all were simultaneously voyeurs and actors in the show. American
and European scholars studied crowds, hoping to find ways to control
Frederick Law
Olmsted, Back Bay
Fens Park and park-
way to Boston
Commons, 1887 
site plan.
3 7 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
the strikes and the ‘mob’ violence of urban riots that intensified in the
1880s. Some American reformers built institutions and outdoor spaces
to bring people together, seeking to mitigate the tensions and pressures
of modern life. Thebustling crowds also spurred entertainment moguls
to create a kaleidoscopic world of commerce and culture with architec-
ture to match. The rise of spectator sports provided acceptable outlets
for emotion. The Cincinnati Red Stockings launched professional base-
John Kellum, rotunda of
the A. T. Stewart
Department Store,
Astor Place, New York
City, 1862–70.
3 8
ball in 1869, and the spread of teams in the 1880s provided key sites for
male camaraderie. These ballparks are still beloved fixtures in national
imaginaries and collective symbols of hometown pride.
Urban parks accommodated a broad mix of people and pursuits,
encouraging amateur sports, various leisure activities and some contact
with what is now designated ‘the Other’. The quintessential example is
New York’s Central Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux in 1857 and
under construction until 1880. Olmsted’s Boston landscapes grew into a
network of differentiated yet coordinated public spaces, much admired
by European visitors, starting in 1878 with a park in the Back Bay Fens
and a proposed parkway to Boston Commons. Olmsted would encom-
pass various efforts throughout the entire metropolitan area to create a
regional park system known as the ‘Emerald Necklace’ (1890). Designers
in Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, San Francisco and other cities
implemented similar large-scale landscape designs. This integration of
nature and infrastructure, planning and ‘non-planning’, provides the
foundation for today’s ecological architecture and Landscape Urbanism.
The department store was a transatlantic phenomenon, its origins
and trajectory almost as elusive as the consumer fantasies it fueled. A. T.
Stewart’s Italianate Marble Palace in New York (1846) was a prototype,
although the Bon Marché in Paris (1852) was far more inventive in its
iron structure and fantastic displays. Stewart then constructed a grand
cast-iron store and, just after the Civil War, a larger emporium further
uptown. By this time, a congruence of modern conditions was affecting
time, space and desires. National transport systems of roads, waterways
and railroads moved goods quickly. Business principles like high vol-
ume, varied choices and fixed prices, including mark-downs, increased
sales. Lively advertising became omnipresent, heightening both fears and
fantasies about class mobility. Marshall Field initiated a concentration
on Chicago’s State Street with his opulent ‘palace’, and an even grander
replacement whose construction began just one day after the 1871 fire.
New York also generated a retail district called ‘Ladies’ Mile’. The
Cincinnati merchant John Shillito created the country’s largest store
under one roof in 1878, using James McLaughlin’s design for an iron-
skeleton frame to obtain maximum open space for display. Department-
store managers claimed their buildings embodied universal progress by
democratizing luxury.
The scale, space and grandeur of these emporia sought to transform
frugal women into avid shoppers. Consumer culture redefined self-
fulfilment in terms of immediate gratification, displacing the earlier
national ethic of hard work, thrift and faith. Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward, a popular utopian novel first published in 1888, imagined
3 9 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
twenty-first-century Boston as a cooperative society of leisure and pleas-
ure centred on a vast emporium where the buyer ‘found under one roof
the world’s assortment in whatever line he desired’.35 Most social critics
of the past century have condemned consumerism as insidious seduction
that trapped the masses, although Walter Benjamin, the brilliant com-
mentator on modern Paris, recognized the allure of commodities
intensified by ‘the crowd that surges around them and intoxicates them’.36
Some theorists now argue that consumer culture can be liberating as well
as manipulative, allowing people, especially women, to imagine alterna-
tive possibilities for their lives. People do take pleasure, albeit fleeting, in
the exhilarating aura that pervades shopping environments.
Nineteenth-century department stores provided fantasy settings for
women and direct contact with goods unimaginably more luxurious than
the simple products they had only recently made themselves. The combina-
tion was intentionally irresistible. Tantalizing entries proclaimed an open-
access policy, welcoming the ‘shawl trade’ of immigrant women as well as
the upper-tier ‘carriage trade’. (The working-class protagonist of Theodore
Dreiser’s 1900 novel, Sister Carrie, loved ‘the delight of parading here as an
equal’.)37 Once inside, women discovered a wonderland focused around
cathedral-like rotundas that featured spectacular displays and concerts.
Open balconies ascended upward, crowned by brilliant stained-glass sky-
lights. The grand emporiums also provided safe and comfortable places for
female customers to rest and recuperate in ladies’ restrooms, lounges, tea-
rooms and nurseries. Shoplifting may have been inevitable given the entice-
ments for immediate gratification of one’s desires, but surveillance could
not break the illusion that miraculous transformations were within any-
one’s reach. So the grand stairways and balconies proved doubly useful,
drawing customers further into a seemingly magical realm while allowing
for discreet monitoring. For good or bad, this modern building type pro-
vided intense, if ephemeral, spectacles, fusing private desires and public
space, an amalgam that is now difficult to dissolve.
Window systems were crucial in department stores, as in other kinds
of modern architecture. Upper-level offices and shopping floors
required maximum light to supplement the central skylights. Street-
level ‘show windows’ were a more complex transitional realm geared to
a new pastime dubbed ‘window shopping’. Early displays that exhibited
products for sale were soon eclipsed by dream-like settings that encour-
aged a suspension of disbelief. Architects experimented with new types
of plate glass to eliminate reflections, making the barrier virtually invis-
ible yet solid, while a new breed of design specialist, the window-dresser,
conjured up magical micro-environments. The most famous of these
was Chicago’s L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz (1900).
Adler & Sullivan,
Schlesinger and
Meyer Department
Store (today Carson
Pirie & Scott),
Chicago, 1891–4,
1903–4.
4 1 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
Perhaps the most alluring
American department store of the
era was Sullivan’s Schlesinger and
Meyer (1891–4, 1903–4) in Chicago
(now Carson, Pirie, Scott). The
show windows set innovative, non-
glare glass in prismatic boxes, while
the ornamentation at street level is
the most exuberant of Sullivan’s
entire career, culminating in a lush,
sumptuously curved corner entry.
Giedion’s photographs in Space,
Time and Architecture ignored this
streetscape to show only the spare
Chicago windows above, so that gen-
erations of young architects stood
outside, asking where to find this
modern masterpiece.
Popular entertainment exemplified
the technical prowess and pyrotech-
nic allure of late nineteenth-century
American modernity. Small-town
‘opera houses’ proliferated with lively
fare that might combine Shakespeare
and Verdi with burlesque. Urban
pleasure gardens, vaudeville theatres
and dance halls presented lively offer-
ings for diverse audiences. Women of
all classes and backgrounds enjoyed
greater freedom at night in cosmopolitan cities. Every neighbourhood
had bars and brothels, but also scores of more respectable settings. Many
facilities were geared to immigrants, who typically separated the propriety
of ‘family audiences’ from prostitutes and saloons (sometimes relegated
to another floor or wing rather than eliminated). ‘Dime museums’
exhibited curiosities, while grand art and natural-history museums dis-
played masterworks. New York’s innovative new theatres spurred the first
legends of Broadway with visual spectaclesthat relied on technologies –
electric footlights, complex backstage components for quick changes of
scenery, mechanical systems for retractable roofs and light shows – all
typically left exposed for ease of work.
Impresarios soon thought of uniting this variety of activities and
audiences in huge palladiums. P. T. Barnum had already converted the
4 2
Francis Kimball and
Thomas Wisedell,
Madison Square
Theater, New York
City, 1879–80, back-
stage technology and
electric footlights.
abandoned railroad depot at New York’s Madison Square into a Great
Hippodrome for horse-shows, concerts, religious revival meetings and
his own circus when he proposed a grand mixed-use coliseum called
Madison Square Garden for the site in 1879. Almost a decade later, an
investment syndicate appropriated the term and chose McKim, Mead
& White to create a ‘Palace of Amusements’ with a hippodrome, concert
halls, dance halls, theatres, restaurants, baths, a sports amphitheatre, an
exhibition hall and outdoor pleasure gardens. The main structure opened
in 1890, the roof garden two years later. In the March 1894 issue of Century
Magazine Mariana van Rensselaer proclaimed that ‘nothing else would be
so sorely missed by all New Yorkers.’38 That possibility seemed preposter-
ous at the time, but high upkeep costs led to the Garden’s demolition in
1925. Only the name survives today, an empty signifier attached to a
mammoth but sterile sports arena near Barnum’s original site.
Fortunately, Chicago’s Auditorium Building still stands, though it too
has been threatened. The difficulty of demolishing so massive a building
saved its life more than once. Distressed by the anarchist bombing at
Haymarket Square in 1886, the clients, Ferdinand Peck and the Chicago
Opera, insisted that the structure be immune to dynamite. Peck wanted a
‘public edifice’ to unite the city with varied amenities, drawing multiple
audiences ranging from national political conventions to subsidized 
concerts for workers. Begun in 1887 and, like Madison Square Garden,
completed in 1890, it was the largest structure in the city’s history and the
4 3 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
Adler & Sullivan,
Chicago Auditorium,
1886–90, section
through theatre. 
most costly in the country’s. Peck chose Dankmar Adler and his young
partner, Louis Sullivan, based on their theatre designs. Given such a
daunting commission and a site that filled half a city block, Peck 
encouraged them to emulate Richardson’s Marshall Field wholesale store
for the exterior. To contrast with the rusticated stone façade, Sullivan cre-
ated a pulsating sequence of richly chromatic settings for the interiors,
culminating in a glorious theatre. Adler’s skill in acoustics merged with
Sullivan’s artistic bravura in the ceiling of elliptical arches embellished
with delicate ornament, hundreds of incandescent lights and openings
for the ventilation system. Folding ceiling panels and vertical screens
could transform the space from a concert hall of 2,500 seats into a con-
vention hall with a capacity of 7,000. Since Peck wanted to make money,
he added offices and a hotel to underwrite the civic and cultural spaces.
A public observation deck on the roof of the eleven-storey office tower
allowed magnificent views of the city. When a building workers’ strike
stopped construction throughout the city, the Mayor insisted that the
Auditorium, a private development, had ‘a quasi-public nature’, so work
continued.39
Another extravaganza, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, left
a more controversial legacy. Some 27 million people, half from abroad,
marvelled at the spectacle that brazenly proclaimed American superiority
in every realm: technological, social, economic and cultural. Conceived
and orchestrated in just over two years under the direction of one man,
Daniel Burnham, and more than 465,000 square metres in area, the
‘White City’ won praise as a cohesive ensemble, a vision of harmony in a
world that seemed marred by drudgery and anarchy. Burnham’s aesthetic
was decidedly Beaux-Arts. The Exposition was modern in its comprehen-
sive planning and its reliance on mass production and new technologies,
notably electricity and modern transportation systems like moving side-
walks. The broad vision also appropriated the excitement of commercial
and popular culture. Burnham himself chose the theatrical impresario Sol
Bloom to oversee the Midway Plaisance, a 1.5-kilometre-long carnival of
exoticism, eroticism and escapism right alongside the grandeur of the
White City. The Midway featured ethnographic displays, more voyeuristic
than educational, and technological wonders like the first Ferris wheel,
which provided unprecedented panoramas of Chicago. Department-store
and railroad executives dominated the committee that presided over the
Exposition, and they wanted a phantasmagoria of enticing variety, not a
static, moralistic tableau.
Later critics condemned the Chicago Exposition as deceptive and
retrograde, largely because of the opulent Beaux-Arts aesthetic that
predominated. Sullivan’s blistering attack still resounds: ‘The damage
4 4
wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if
not longer.’40 This exaggerated prophecy was written in the 1920s, when
Sullivan was embittered and impoverished. Such vindictive antagonism
harmed American architecture, setting up a battle that privileges those
who wield the greatest power, such that architects simultaneously dis-
miss them and try to usurp their supremacy. Montgomery Schuyler
recognized the broader implications of the Chicago Exposition. An
ardent modernist, he lamented the dominant aesthetic as ‘hopelessly
prosaic [and] pedantic’. Nonetheless, it was just a ‘passing show’.
Everyone knew that the white plaster surfaces were ‘architectural screens
. . . executed on a colossal stage’, for this was ‘a success of illusion’.41
Visitors admired the cohesive planning that brought together hundreds
of diverse sites, including Sullivan’s resplendent Transportation
Building. Official photographs or speeches celebrated a grand imperial
vision of American culture, but the experience was richer, more incon-
gruous, a mêlée of surprises and juxtapositions.
The spectacular 1893 Exposition died as planned after only six
months, though it remains part of the American collective conscious-
ness. Its reassuring thematic cohesion persists in many public settings,
from historic districts to shopping malls. The scope of Burnham’s con-
trol and his corporate values established a significant model for later
urban ‘revitalization’ plans. There are also other more auspicious reper-
cussions in our contemporary world: waterfront reclamation and tem-
porary spaces for illusory images, fleeting events, participatory per-
formances. Can we heed Schuyler’s urbane analysis, rejecting simple
binaries of good/bad, daring to engage a range of alternatives at the
same time? There is something to be learned from the allure of popular
success and even historicist fantasies. Surely modern architecture and
thought have the strength to engage diverse aesthetic and social worlds?
As Schuyler showed so well, tolerance does not mean abandoning 
critical judgements.
4 5 M o d e r n C o n s o l i d a t i o n , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 9 3
Frank Lloyd Wright,
‘A Home in a Prairie
Town’, Ladies’ Home
Journal model house,
February 1901. 
Herbert Croly considered the 1890s a pivotal decade when ‘Americans
began to realize that their stock of buildings of all kinds was inadequate,
or superannuated’. As editor of Architectural Record from 1901 to 1909,
Croly called on readers to generate up-to-date building types and
assume a new responsibility for directing urban growth. More specifical-
ly, they should purge ‘meaningless eccentricities’ from houses and
impose modern standards for urban design, adapted to changing condi-
tions while still respectful of surrounding contexts, a synthesis he called
‘a nationalization of taste’.1 Croly’s smallbut influential book, The
Promise of American Life (1909), transferred these ambitions to the
national political scene. He contended that the statesman, the philan-
thropist, the reformer and the architect were modern heroes, leaders
whose specialized expertise should command authority. The book helped
launch Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912. Two years later, Croly
published Progressive Democracy, renouncing his earlier demand for
expert control. He now emphasized a very different Modernism based on
participation, flexibility and ‘curiosity’ about other modes of thought,
other ways of life. Croly thus encapsulates the two somewhat contra-
dictory aspects of the American progressive movement: elite and
standardized; popular and diffuse.2
The term progressive denotes an aspiration for progress as ameliora-
tions, making it virtually synonymous with modern architecture past
and present, orthodox and eclectic. The word was also used for a
panoply of American reform movements in the 1890s and early twenti-
eth century up through World War One. Croly helped fuse the two
trajectories, as did Frank Lloyd Wright, the social reformer Jane Addams,
the philosopher and educator John Dewey, the feminist Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and many others. American progressivism (the lower-
case ‘p’ distinguishes the diverse and vibrant progressive movement
from Roosevelt’s formal political party) was a form of social democracy,
albeit more closely aligned with incremental improvements than with
radical politics. Deeply nationalistic and committed to local action,
c h a p t e r t w o
Progressive Architectures,
1894–1918
progressive reformers were also internationalists, exchanging ideas with
colleagues across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Theirs was a wide-ranging
and pluralistic movement, never unified under one banner. Scholars
emphasize multiple realms of action: structural reform of government;
regulations to constrain corporations and industries; social ambitions
for institutions and public services; moral uplift through nature and
religion; housing reform for all classes.3 Environments provided a shared
leitmotif as visible critiques of what was wrong and alternative proposals
that were mostly restrained modifications rather than utopian visions,
although emotional passions were strong.
Like their European counterparts, fin-de-siècle American progressives
wanted subjective intensity. Feeling stifled by the ‘flatness’ of contempo-
rary life, they sought renewal through the ‘vital contact’ of experience in
the world. That experience was often disconcerting. Some responded to
what seemed chaos with cries for rigorous controls. Others abandoned
established norms and rules, seeking to take account of the incongru-
ous, competing and unconscious modes of thought they encountered.
Nietzsche, Bergson and Freud provided key theoretical premises, but so
did American thinkers. William James described a belief that resonated
in architecture, declaring: ‘What really exists is not things made but
things in the making.’4
Pragmatism emerged in this context, a distinct though not exclusively
American philosophy. Conceived as a science, pragmatism sought to deal
with conflicting beliefs and ideas that are continuously evolving, contin-
gent upon circumstances, meaningful in terms of actual effects rather
than elegant abstractions. James expounded a theory of ‘indeterminism
… in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene’.
Spatially and socially, his ‘mosaic philosophy’ emphasized heterogeneous
fringes or patches, potentially linked through an incalculable number of
superimposed realities.5 John Dewey, a professor of education at the
University of Chicago and then at Columbia, stressed learning through
experience – what is still called progressive education. The arts played a
key role, simultaneously instrumental and experiential in an expanded
public realm that we today call civil society.6 The acerbic economist
Thorstein Veblen also viewed aesthetics in pragmatist terms. The Theory
of the Leisure Class (1899) excoriated ‘conspicuous consumption’ among
the wealthy, not just extravagant opulence but the expensive restraint of
the arts and crafts as well. Veblen’s masterwork, The Instinct of
Workmanship (1914), affirmed creativity as a fundamental human drive,
increasingly more hybrid and rigid under the forces of modern society.
The city became the principal locus and subject for progressive
Americans in every realm. The reformer Frederic Howe optimistically
4 8
described the metropolis as an ‘experiment station . . . the hope of the
future’.7 New York seemed the quintessential modern metropolis.
Representations of the city’s architecture destabilized categories such as
beauty and ugliness. Numerous visions of contemporary life tenuously
coexisted, popular and professional, liberating and oppressive. A self-
declared ‘Young Generation’ of writers and artists synthesized the
John Marin, cover for
Alfred Stieglitz’s
magazine 291 (June
1915). 
4 9 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
emerging currents of realism and plasticity to evoke urban life. Painters
like Marsden Hartley wanted to ‘release art from its infliction of the big
“A’’’.8 So did John Marin, who trained as an architect and who captured
the dynamic cadence of skyscrapers that shift and collide like our per-
ceptions of them. Photography also rendered the metropolis through
different modalities: the voyeuristic shock of Jacob Riis, the muted inde-
terminacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, the human dignity of Lewis Hine.
Adapting Dewey’s ideas about the aesthetic dimension of education,
Hine sought to convey both what should be respected and what should
be changed.9
The polyglot mixture of people in large American cities inspired
young artists and intellectuals, even as it disturbed their elders. Between
1870 and 1920, some 20 million immigrants arrived in America, princi-
pally from southern and eastern Europe. By 1910, one in three Americans
was an immigrant or had a foreign-born parent, more than half in large
cities. Extreme poverty in overcrowded immigrant ‘ghettos’ was com-
pounded by inadequate municipal services. Nativists demonized these
‘aliens’ as a threat to the ‘American way of life’, but others were fascinat-
ed by the ‘authentic’ (or enticingly exotic) culture of their street life and
distinctive social institutions.
The wide-ranging essayist Randolph Bourne seized upon immigration
as the basis for a modern national identity. His ‘Trans-national America’
Lewis Hine, baseball
in a Boston tenement
alley, c. 1909, photo-
graph.
5 0
was cosmopolitan and adventurous. Several articles on architecture
expressed the hope that multiculturalism would overturn the ‘cultural
colonialism’ of derivative Beaux-Arts design.10 While most progressive
reformers sought better housing and planned leisure activities for ethnic
neighbourhoods, Bourne embraced their energy as a ‘New Freedom that
really liberates and relaxes the spirit from the intolerable tensions of an
over-repressed and mechanicalized world’.11 Like other sympathizers, he
romanticized what he saw, more concerned about creative inspiration
than actual conditions. And he remained silent about African-Americans.
The Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson had established
the principle of ‘separate but equal’ facilities, institutionalizing racial
inequalities beneath a modern rhetoric of difference.
Another, sometimes overlapping, group of progressives focused on
systematic analysis and objectivity as modern vehicles for change. The
engineer, the professional bureaucrat and the technical specialist
embodied a rationalized approach that would soon influence every type
of work and every building. The social sciences coalesced in the late
nineteenth century, taking a dominant role in American research uni-
versities, businesses and reform organizations. Many scholars tested
theoretical premises in real-life situations, whetherfactories or urban
neighbourhoods, convinced that rigorous analyses would ameliorate the
environments they studied; others relied on the subtleties of human
observation and interaction. Amateurs and professionals alike compiled
arsenals of seemingly unbiased visual material including statistics, maps
and documentary photographs, hopeful that evidence would generate
both a public demand for reform and the direction it should take.
Architects like Daniel Burnham used such data to venture into city plan-
ning, both small ensembles and large-scale schemes sponsored by
businessmen’s clubs. As John Dewey recognized, there were many kinds
of modern education ranging from visual to verbal, from the dictums of
experts to collaborative exchange.
Progressive-era Americans saw their cities through a kaleidoscope,
fractured yet endlessly fascinating. They wanted change and often
embraced it, but remained cautious about moving beyond descriptive
critiques of what existed. Major architectural innovations occurred
despite all the constraints, mainly outside major cities or on their
fringes. At least initially, the designers were themselves peripheral to the
profession and unknown to one another, although they were involved
with local and, later, transnational organizations. Some might even be
considered amateurs, with little or no formal education in architecture
schools. As such, they had much in common with the remarkable inde-
pendent inventers who dominated the age, men like Thomas Edison and
5 1 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
Nikola Tesla. Clients were equally unconventional, ranging from 
middle-class families to small businessmen. Popular culture embraced
this work, as much as, if not more than, the professional architecture
media. This was unquestionably an anomalous Modernism. But it trans-
formed home lives, work lives and public lives, not just of Americans but
of people around the world.
Systems and Battlefields of Business
Americans recognized momentous transformations in the nature of
work and the making of products at the turn of the last century.
Architecture adapted of necessity to competing demands for more pre-
cision and flexibility. The efficiency craze was formalized in the 1910s,
under the label of ‘scientific management’ and the name of engineer
Frederick Winslow Taylor. A skilled publicist, Taylor focused on work-
ers’ efficient, cost-saving movements through space. The simple
precepts of his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management,
inspired an army of disciples who became professional consultants to
business and industry, proclaiming Taylor’s maxim that there is always
‘one best way’.
Initially focused on industrial production, Taylorism would spread
to every sort of workplace, from offices to homes. Yet Taylor and his
cohorts did not rethink factory architecture. That process began in the
1880s when the use of electricity and advances in concrete construction,
which led to façades becoming more transparent and interior spaces
larger and less encumbered. In this as in other fields of technological
experimentation, early American innovators drew on experience rather
than formal education as architects or engineers. Factories provided the
first evidence of change as façades became more transparent and inte-
rior spaces larger and less encumbered.
Ernest L. Ransome, an English-born family-trained engineer, seems to
have invented the concrete-frame factory in California in the 1880s,
partly in response to the danger of earthquakes, then quickly patented his
technology and designs even as he went beyond them. Ransome’s first
East Coast commission was the Pacific Borax plant in Bayonne, New
Jersey (1898), which attracted considerable attention when it survived a
horrific fire in 1903. Hired that very year for an addition to the plant, he
systematically used concrete to mould floors and columns. He recog-
nized that exterior walls, no longer load-bearing, could be transformed
into extensive window-walls that improved safety, quality control and
worker morale. Fully conscious of this breakthrough, Ransome heralded
his ‘Daylight Factory’ as a ‘modern type’ of structure. His best-known
Detail of map 
showing immigrant
ethnicities in blocks
of West Chicago from
Hull House Maps and
Papers (1892).
5 3 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
building, likewise from 1903 to 1906, was a larger facility for the United
Shoe Manufacturing Company in Beverly, Massachusetts. Its starring
role in architectural history came through European validation. The
owner of Germany’s Fagus Shoe-Last Company visited Beverly in 1910 to
procure financing for his venture and, on his return, presented Walter
Gropius with photographs of Ransome’s building (and of Albert Kahn’s
Ford plant in Highland Park, Michigan). Both architect and client called
the 1912 Faguswerk ‘an American factory’.12
New systems changed factory-building, much like the work inside,
with a continuous flow of work and a shift from skilled to relatively
unskilled labor. The timber-and-masonry construction of ‘mill-doctors’
disappeared as reinforced concrete became standard. Structural break-
throughs were in fact adaptations – what came to be called applied (as
opposed to theoretical) knowledge. Engineers continuously tested ideas
in the field, often in collaboration with university-based materials-sci-
ence programmes. Ransome’s protégé, C.P.A. Turner of Minneapolis,
invented mushroom-column construction around 1909, unaware of
simultaneous European experiments by Robert Maillart and François
Hennebique. Ransome’s book, Reinforced Concrete in Factory Production
(1912), resembled a kit-of-parts more than a treatise on structure. Yet
this approach relied on a concept, a pragmatic mode of questions,
experimentation and modifications that can be linked, albeit indirectly,
to the work of James and Dewey.
The iconic industrial buildings of the modern era, grain silos and
grain elevators, developed in much the same way. The cylindrical con-
5 4
Ernest L. Ransome,
United States Shoe
Machinery Company
factory, Beverly,
Massachusetts, 1906,
from a Ransome &
Smith Co. ad in
System: The Magazine
of Business (1906). 
crete form originated near Minneapolis in 1899, initially ridiculed as
‘Peavey’s Folly’. (Frank Peavey was an international grain dealer, Charles
Haglin his architect.) It protected produce remarkably well and quickly
became the industry standard. Meanwhile, American dominance of the
world grain market connected scattered rural storage silos to batteries of
huge transfer- or terminal-elevators in port cities. The Washburn-
Crosby (now General Mills) Elevator in Buffalo was the most
photographed example. The first structure was built in 1903, the second
in concrete, two years later. European modern architects were awed by
these unintentional monuments yet principally concerned with their
own artful gaze. Erich Mendelsohn wrote of ‘childhood forms, clumsy,
full of primeval power, dedicated to purely practical ends’.13 American
Precisionist painters such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler recog-
nized the intelligence that underlay this distinctly American building
type, but they, too, romanticized the subject, celebrating grain-elevators
as an expression of a new ‘certainty’ in business and the culture at large.
The reality of cultural history lies in between these extremes, cognizant
of individual designers and evolving processes, both of which proceed in
irregular cadences.
The year 1906 saw two key commissions in the automobile industry:
Pierce Arrow’s one-storey factory in Buffalo and Packard’s Building No.
10 in Detroit. Albert Kahn, a self-educated German-American, designed
them both, and his brother Julius invented the innovative concrete truss
system that permitted the long spans. Space opened up, free of obstacles,
maximizing the potential for endless
expansion and improvements. Henry Ford
was so impressed that he asked Kahn to
design a newfacility at Highland Park, a
suburb north-west of Detroit. The initial
complex of eight buildings, commissioned
in 1909, was in operation by 1910. The main
structure, soon known as the Old Shop, was
dubbed the ‘Crystal Palace’ because of its
window-walls. Ford asked Kahn to combine
two massive buildings, cover them with
glass and consolidate processes inside. A
giant craneway at the centre, set on a mono-
rail and connected to the glass roof above,
distributed materials. Greater control over
light and ventilation increased equipment
tolerance and therefore output. The factory
itself was now a productive machine.
Bateman & Johnson,
Washburn-Crosby
(now General Mills)
Grain Elevator,
Buffalo, New York,
1903–5, from Erich
Mendelsohn’s
Amerika (1926).
5 5 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
Ford later identified the salient feature of his approach as ‘System,
system, system’.14 Recognizing that systems are never static, he com-
missioned a sequence of new types. The six-storey New Shop
accommodated more processes. This interior focused around a glass-
roofed, six-storey craneway that ran the entire 257-metre length;
railroad tracks below moved everything directly into place for con-
tinuous, calibrated production. A single-level plant in 1913 was
specifically designed for a continuous assembly line – again, less a
unique invention than a culmination of preceding experiments. By
that year Ford had similar assembly plants in other cities. Despite
their being filled with light and ergonomically advanced, the relent-
less control over everyone’s place and movements led to higher rates
of worker turnover.
Ford’s concept of mass production altered workspace, labour condi-
tions and consumerism. His plants produced some 6,000 identical
Albert Kahn with
Ernest Wilby, Ford
Motor Company,
Highland Park,
Michigan, 1909–10,
in a 1913 photograph. 
5 6
Model t cars in 1908, 182,000 in 1913 and 741,000 in 1917 – at an ever-
lower price. The system, soon called Fordism, and its concomitant
architecture spread throughout the world. Kahn’s factories had to be
modern in a new way, anticipating continual expansion, replication and
obsolescence. He did not celebrate the iconic modernity of the automo-
bile, nor did he claim to design the production system. His was an
unmediated and direct response, a series of envelopes tailored to Ford’s
ongoing, almost obsessive advances.
Commercial office buildings faced a related set of issues. The great
mergers of 1895–1904 created the major corporations of the twentieth
century, names like us Steel, at&t and DuPont. Most of the country’s
industrial base came into the hands of about 50 giant corporations
known as trusts, which eradicated thousands of small companies. A
national, and soon international, scale of distribution extended to
other businesses, notably mail-order companies and service industries.
Americans’ attitudes towards big business ranged from awe to outright
hatred, which fed ‘trust-busting’ crusades and critiques of the ‘Soulless
Corporation’. Even more than factories, these much larger headquarters
had to produce not just efficiency, but a new, more manipulative form
of advertising based on the ‘science’ of public relations.
Not surprisingly, the response differentiated interiors from façades.
The Chicago-based magazine System, founded in 1900, described interior
design as a key weapon in the ‘battlefields of business’. Large companies
needed multiple floors for a network of differentiated tasks. Elaborate
charts and statistical tables organized procedures and people, bringing
order to the vast empires. Scientific managers took the factory as their
Albert Kahn, Ford
New Shop, Highland
Park, Michigan,
1914–15, factory 
interior with six 
stories of craneway
connectors.
5 7 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
model, assigning hordes of workers to repetitive tasks at specified spots
in huge, open ‘bullpens’ overseen by foremen. Systemization extended to
status, including gender relations. Some companies with large numbers
of female clerks segregated the sexes, as much to ensure orderly work
relations as to show paternalistic concerns for morals. Most relied on
rigid specifications for virtually every space and body. Managerial power
seemed dependent on evidence of control, made visible in efficient spa-
tial organization and the subordination of office workers as well as those
in factories.
The annus mirabilis of 1906 witnessed an example and a partial excep-
tion to this trend: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building
just outside Buffalo (demolished in 1950 to make way for a truck-storage
garage). This was the headquarters for the fast-growing mail-order busi-
ness of a soap manufactory. Wright aptly called it both a ‘commercial
engine’ and a ‘family gathering’ for the employees, including 1,800 cleri-
cal workers.15 He geared the design to specific needs: systematic mail
handling, a carefully coordinated hierarchy and a wholesome image –
essential advertising for a soap company. Efforts to maximize efficiency
led to some of the first architect-designed office furnishings. This ode to
work converged at the central atrium where the managers sat alongside
their secretaries. Twenty-one metres of open space soared above them,
flooded with light from a glass skylight. The upper levels opened onto
this majestic volume and connected via half-flights of stairs to an adja-
cent annex, creating a complex spatial interweaving. The top floor and
roof level contained a staff restaurant, conservatory and exercise prome-
nade, thus combining services with surveillance.
5 8
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Larkin Company
Administration
Building, Buffalo, New
York, 1904–06.
Larkin Administration
Building, photograph
of light court, 1906.
If employee morale supposedly depended on the edifying virtues of
orderly work, both management and architect insisted on a pleasant
environment. Like other advanced workplaces of the era, the Larkin
Building was sealed off from the outside – a necessity given its polluted
surroundings consisting of the factory and local rail yards – but Wright
provided air conditioning. He installed an air-purifying and cooling
device manufactured in Chicago, then augmented it by placing the air-
exhaust units in massive stair-towers at the corners. Wright bridged two
kinds of Modernism here, one concerned with pure structure and
rationality, the other with ongoing improvements in human comfort
and control. As we shall see, he brought this same dynamic synthesis of
innovations and adaptations to his domestic architecture.
6 0
Willis Polk, Halladie
Building, San
Francisco, 1917–18.
Apart from such exceptional buildings, the commercial buildings of
early twentieth-century American cities can pose a challenge to anyone
with a modernist education. Metal-and-glass façades on smaller build-
ings often achieved a lyrical beauty with exterior ornament that obscured
the ferocity of capitalism and its concomitant innovations. Façades also
functioned as advertising, giving a distinctive image (a brand, we might
say today) to the company. Cass Gilbert’s extravagant Woolworth
Building in New York City (1911–13) was famously called the ‘Cathedral
of Commerce’. Solon Beman’s Studebaker Building in Chicago (1885),
both a headquarters and showroom, defined that city’s Automobile Row
for the next two decades. Large corporations like Singer, Woolworth and
Metropolitan Life competed to put their name on the tallest building in
the world.
Willis Polk’s Halladie Building in San Francisco (1918) boasted the
first large-scale curtain wall, its broad glass panels hung a metre in front
of the structure and bolted to thin concrete slabs. At the time it seemed
a ‘frontless building’, possibly dangerous and visibly cheap, especially
since Polk painted the exuberant ornamental ironwork bright blue and
gold to honour the owner, the Regents of the University of California.
Small businesses likewiseexplored advertisement and public rela-
tions. Plate glass and colourful terracotta ornament abounded on Main
Streets in large and mid-size towns, even along the new ‘taxpayer strips’
of inexpensive temporary buildings geared to automobile traffic. (The
term meant than owners just wanted to break even on taxes, anticipat-
ing more lucrative development in the near future.) Substance was more
crucial for financial institutions. Purcell & Elmslie and Louis Sullivan
built handsome banks in small Midwestern towns. Interiors and exteri-
ors were striking yet purposefully unostentatious. Sullivan declared that
his banks fostered democratic values, ‘deifying the commonplace’, as
with his adaptation of an industrial material – rough-cut, multi-hued
tinted bricks – so luminous that locals nicknamed them ‘jewel boxes’.16
These architects showed a deep faith in their society, but we should not
take them or their clients too literally. Progressive governments in these
states passed legislation that required banks to invest in their local com-
munities and extend credit more liberally. The reforms were not related
to the transformative power of architecture
The ‘New Woman’ and the Simplified Home
Progressive ideals about the public interest had a potent effect on the
private realm. A chorus of voices – architects, builders, building-trades
unions, feminists and other reformers – condemned the ‘costly ugliness’,
6 1 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
inefficient construction, insalubrious sanitation and ‘undemocratic’
extravagance of Victorian dwellings. Middle-class women wanted to
extend their concerns citywide, improving standards for health, com-
fort, economy and beauty in all dwellings, a concept known as
municipal housekeeping. An architecture for ‘rational beings’ would be
simpler, standardized, efficient, economical. ‘A busy woman,’ wrote
Mary Gay Humphries in 1896, ‘says her idea of the house of the future is
one that can be cleaned with a hose.’17 Progressive architects never
picked up on this particular suggestion, but they often talked with
women’s reform groups and wrote for popular shelter magazines, fol-
lowing John Dewey’s belief in ongoing exchange between experts and
users of a similar class.
The ‘New Woman’ was omnipresent, a distinctly American character
who first emerged in the 1890s, demanding greater economic, social,
political and sexual freedom. Such women eagerly embraced modernity
without abandoning all supposedly traditional comforts or roles,
although Harper’s Bazaar did condemn the single-family dwelling as ‘a
prison and a burden and a tyrant’.18 The word feminism appeared early in
the century, encompassing various ambitions and desires rather than one
uniform image. Work became a prime issue since almost one in four
American women were earning wages by 1900, whether as servants,
labourers, ‘working girls’ or professionals. Many working women had to
plan for childcare and other responsibilities – the ‘infrapolitics’ of every-
day life, too often invisible in political or social analysis.19 Even those with
no outside jobs demanded simpler, more efficient homes to gain extra
time for social life and reform. Middle-class domesticity was affected by
Irving Gill, project for
Marion Olmsted
House, San Diego,
California, 1911, from
The Craftsman (May
1916).
6 2
overlapping changes. The number of children declined markedly, and the
number of domestic servants fell by half between 1900 and 1920. Almost
a third of the nation’s female population lived alone or with other
women by 1910, ‘adrift’ to some observers, ‘self-sufficient’ to others.20
A new profession called home economics or domestic science medi-
ated between women, government and the private marketplace. By 1916
almost 200 colleges and universities had specialized departments to edu-
cate female students as modern specialists, consumers and citizens.
Home economists always defined modern homes in the plural, never as
‘the modern home’. Three fundamental tenets stood out: private and
public realms were fundamentally interrelated; household knowledge
relied on biological and social sciences, not fashion; and all kinds of
dwellings needed change, from suburban houses to urban tenements.
Several home economists praised the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and
his cohorts.21 The radical feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman leaned
strongly towards simplification, standardization, smooth surfaces and
efficient spatial organization. Her 1903 book, The Home: Its Work and
Influence, condemned the ‘myth’ of domestic economy, explaining that
‘the more elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit’.22
She also encouraged women to think about cooperative approaches to
housing, housekeeping and childcare, such as the recent introduction of
kindergartens. The striking exception, Christine Frederick, the self-
promoting Martha Stewart of her day, promulgated the authoritarian
techniques, charts and rhetoric of scientific management. German
modernists like Bruno Taut and Alexander Klein would incorporate
Frederick’s routing diagrams into their housing texts, drawn to her
insistence on expert definitions of ‘the one best way’ – clearly a reference
to Taylor’s scientific management.23
Health became an aesthetic imperative with the recognition that
germs caused disease. Housewives now demanded smooth hygienic sur-
faces to minimize (and reveal) dust or dirt; every home economist
condemned Victorian woodwork detailing as ‘abiding-places for germs’.
The process of elimination extended from a simplified aesthetic to high-
er standards for plumbing fixtures. The kitchen and bathroom vied with
the informal living room as the symbolic core of the modern American
home. Adolf Loos praised American bathrooms as ‘genuine Modernism’
in his 1898 essay ‘Plumbers’.24
Higher, more expensive standards for household technologies
required smaller, more efficient plans. Built-in furnishings helped max-
imize the small floor area of an average house. Pantries disappeared as
commercial enterprises took over domestic tasks like canning food.
Equally important, simplified façades rebuked ostentatious competition
6 3 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
and proclaimed democratic equality as a foundation for mental health.
Marion Talbot, a professor at the University of Chicago, sought to make
the home and family ‘effective parts of the social fabric’ both in the
Department of Sociology and in the city outside.25
The shelter media encouraged similar ideas. Edward Bok, editor of
Ladies’ Home Journal, launched a crusade to modernize American
domestic architecture in the late 1890s. His definition was functional: a
living room to replace the fussy parlour, no ‘senseless ornament’, at least
one bathroom and improved ventilation. This milieu provided the first
opportunity for Frank Lloyd Wright to show his alchemy, converting a
simple programme into architectural gold. Wright published the first of
three houses for Ladies’ Home Journal in February 1901, calling it ‘A
Home in a Prairie Town’.26 The design contains virtually every revolu-
tionary theme he would employ for the next two decades. While the
building seems embedded in its landscape, the massing suggests the
remarkable spaces within. Wright and others since likened the effect to
dynamiting the boxy Victorian home. A similar design was built a year
later: the Ward Willitts House in Highland Park, Illinois. Unfortunately,
the architect could not find a client for the ‘Quadruple Block’ site plan
in the upper corner of the Journal article, which showed various
arrangements of four uniform houses.
Wright poured most of his energies into small houses and three
grand dwellings: the Martin House in Buffalo (1904), the Coonley
House and the Robie House in Chicago (1910). This last, designed for the
family of a bicycle- and automobile-parts manufacturer, culminated the
process of abstraction (‘articulation’ in Wright’s terms) that hehad
evolved over a decade. The long, narrow, three-storey house sits on a
corner lot in the university neighbourhood of Hyde Park, near what had
been the Midway in 1893. The horizontal lines of the masonry walls are
high, screening views of the outdoor rooms and the interior. The entry
is hidden away, almost insignificant in the formal composition. Low-
pitched roofs reinforce the geometry and tie the house to the ground, as
in Wright’s suburban Prairie Houses of this era.
The Robie House interior is startling to this day. The social area of
the main floor is a free flow of space around the solid mass of the cen-
tral fireplace/staircase, which provides a break between the living and
dining areas. A separate wing floats quietly to the rear with a guestroom,
kitchen and servants’ rooms. The only embellishment is the geometric
patterns of leaded-glass windows and the structural elements them-
selves, including vents for the integrated central-heating system
Transverse oak strips in the ceiling hold electric lights, accentuating the
sense of technical precision while providing a natural balance. This is
6 4
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Frederick C. Robie House,
Chicago, 1908–10.
Robie House, main floor
plan. 
Robie House, living room.
undeniably a modern house – abstract, even slightly anonymous. Like
Wright’s other dwellings, it nonetheless maintains a connection with
traditional, almost atavistic ideals of a family shelter, notably in the
hearth and the faint allusion to the beamed ceilings of Colonial-era
houses.
Only much later, in his 1931 lectures on modern architecture, would
Wright establish a nine-point statement of principles, crystallizing ideas
that had emerged in his work and in the larger culture. These were: a
reduction of elements to achieve unity; horizontal planes to integrate
building and site; elimination of basements to raise houses off the
ground; spaces defined by screens rather than cellular rooms; windows
grouped as banks of ‘light screens’; one continuous material for the
façade and no applied ornamentation, both to highlight ‘the nature of
materials’; incorporation of all mechanical features into the architectural
scheme; likewise with built-in furnishings; and elimination of deco-
rators in favour of the architect’s total-design concept.27 This list
encapsulates the directness that characterized American housing reform
of the progressive era, the emphasis on modern processes and effects
more than aesthetic representation. Despite metaphors that resembled
those of the European Modern Movement – the kitchen was likened to
a ‘laboratory’, a ‘surgery’, a ‘domestic factory’ – there was no demand for
severity. Wright challenged conventional American ideas about domes-
tic space without trying to disturb the eye or disrupt the harmony of
social relations. That would change when he abandoned first his family
and Oak Park and then the harmonies of the Prairie House for the more
radical clime of the Southwest and California.
Eclectic northern California began to capture the public imagination
in the early twentieth century. Bernard Maybeck helped launch what the
historian Lewis Mumford would later call the First Bay Area Style, a
joyful Modernism that freely mixed local vernaculars with Japanese and
European influences, native redwood with industrial materials, compo-
sitional order with quirky details. The micro-ecology of this area,
distinctive both climactically and culturally, encouraged a cult of well-
being through aesthetic restraint and closeness to nature. Charles
Keeler’s The Simple House (1904) affected Maybeck (who built Keeler’s
house) and colleagues such as Ernest Coxhead, Lillian Bridgman, Willis
Polk and Julia Morgan. John Galen Howard was so adamant about
process that he only gave client and crew foundation plans; he designed
day by day, testing his ideas, integrating interior with exterior, familiar-
ity with innovation. Drawing on Bergson and James, he saw modern
houses ‘in the making’, activated by the memories and possibilities of
human lives.28
6 6
Southern California proved equally fertile. The brothers Charles and
Henry Greene fused East and West in their virtuoso designs, notably the
Gamble House in Pasadena (1908), with its crescendos and pianissimos
of woodwork, light and landscape. Irving Gill preferred plain, asymmet-
rical walls of poured concrete or tilt-up panels, enlivened with cubic
shapes and bold geometric openings. His designs eliminated super-
fluous detail while retaining a palpable sense of grace, the result of
deference to local traditions and a respect for economy. Iridescent inte-
rior tints made even small rooms seem ‘like living in the heart of a shell’.
Interiors showed Gill’s strong feminist sympathies with innovative plans
and smooth surfaces to achieve ‘the maximum of comfort . . . with the
minimum of drudgery’.29 Commissions ranged from the magnificent
Dodge House in Los Angeles, sadly demolished in 1970, to modest
workers’ dwellings. Gill’s favourite work was Bella Vista Terrace or Lewis
Courts, a group of low-cost dwellings built in 1910. In projects large or
small, grand or spartan, his site plans synthesized public and private
outdoor areas, while the simple ‘sanitary’ dwellings boasted labour-sav-
ing devices as well as simplified forms.
Three popular trends helped disseminate modern ideas and aesthetics
among a broad swath of architects, builders and clients. The first was pre-
fabrication, including pre-cut (or ‘Ready-Cut’) houses for mail-order
companies. Builders and architects, too, designed limited repertoires of
typologies with distinctive façades to disguise the standardization such as
Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for the American System-Built Houses
Company in Milwaukee from 1915 to 1917. Factory managers and home
economists also provided labour-saving innovations. When Sears,
Roebuck & Company added houses to its well-known catalogue in 1908,
Irving Gill, Lewis
Courts, Sierra Madre,
California, 1910.
6 7 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
the enthusiastic response generated a special publication, Sears’ Modern
Homes, published from 1909 to 1937. By 1939 Sears claimed that over
100,000 families were living in their homes. This prefabrication relied on
a national transportation infrastructure, advertisements in the national
media, centralized industrial production and a radically simplified, stan-
dardized yet familiar aesthetic.30
The second trend came from Gustav Stickley, a furniture designer,
whose magazine, The Craftsman, published from 1901 to 1916, featured
moderate-cost dwellings with simplified elements and local materials.
Committed to the socialism and artistic principles of William Morris,
Stickley pressed Arts and Crafts ideals about visible evidence of crafts-
manship, especially that of carpenters and masons. All the same, he
cautiously incorporated industrial techniques to reduce the cost of houses
for average Americans. The Craftsman published work by architects such
as Gill and Sullivan, as well as by builders and ingenious amateurs.
Another ardent feminist, Stickley encouraged women professionals while
his articles stressed ease of maintenance and fluid connections within the
dwelling. The Craftsman house ideal spread beyond the magazine and
Stickley’s short-lived empire.
Third was a type: the bungalow, a comfortable minimal dwelling (usu-
ally one or one-and-a-half storeys and under 75 square metres), especially
popular from 1900 to the 1920s. Here, too, the media played a role, from the
architectural press to scores of popular plan books, magazines and even
songs from Tin Pan Alley, as New York’s Broadway came to be called. This
early global trend made its way from India to Australia, Britain and the us
‘A Craftsman Living
Room’ from The
Craftsman (October
1905). 
6 8
6 9 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
Sylvanus B. Marston, St
Francis Court, Pasadena,
California, 1909, perspec-
tive with floor plans.
WalterBurley Griffin,
houses in Trier Center
Neighborhood,
Winnetka, Illinois,
1913, drawing by
Marion Mahoney.
in the 1880s, first as vacation homes on the East Coast, then as moderate-
cost mass housing in California. Builders and architects alike were pleased
with the potential new market. Distinguishing characteristics included a
low-pitched overhanging roof, a front porch with rather hefty supports
and abundant built-in furnishings. As both the word and the basic concept
swept the country in the 1910s and ’20s, regions from Seattle to Chicago to
Florida evolved their own distinctive variations.
Site planning posed quite a challenge for small houses, which look
dwarfed and out of place along conventional residential streets.
Residents sometimes wanted to emphasize shared social activities. The
Los Angeles architect Sylvanus Marston was the first to group bungalows
Grosvenor Atterbury,
Forest Hills Gardens,
Queens, New York,
1909–12, precast 
concrete panels being
lifted into place. 
Forest Hills Gardens,
concrete-panel 
houses with neo-
Tudor ornament and 
a recent third storey
addition, photo-
graphed in 2007. 
off the street around a courtyard. His St Francis Court in Pasadena
(1909) combined eleven small houses around a central court to address
problems of landscaping, standardization and scale, while he provided
collective space. This arrangement spread quickly. Arthur and Alfred
Heineman began a series of courts within a year, radically increasing
the number of houses per hectare. Bungalow courts with community
buildings were especially popular among single women.31 Ingenious
modifications included double bungalows with sliding doors between
the living rooms so residents could create a larger joint space when
(and if) they wished to. Architects of middle-class subdivisions
expanded on the bungalow-court idea with far more spacious grounds.
Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney did several such groupings
in the Midwest. They encouraged collective ownership of land, in
part out of political conviction, in part to ensure concern for the
landscape.
Working-class housing reform likewise integrated individual and
collective settings. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francisco Terrace in Oak Park,
completed in 1895 for the philanthropist Edward Waller, focused
around a courtyard. Grosvenor Atterbury’s Forest Hills Gardens
(1909–12) relied on a site plan by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr, to mix
apartment buildings, attached houses and single-family dwellings. The
Russell Sage Foundation subsidized this model workers’ suburb in the
New York borough of Queens. Atterbury’s efforts to strike a balance
between domestic symbolism and economy led to an experimental sec-
tion using pre-cast concrete panels lifted into place with a crane; he
then tacked on neo-Tudor detailing to soften or re-familiarize the
rather spare aesthetic. American minimalism thus recast the idea of
architectural honesty, acknowledging the truth of ambivalent human
desires rather than insisting on pure structural expression. The market
triumphed over good intentions, however, when enthusiasm for the
high-quality design priced workers out of this middle-class haven.
Mutual Education and Fantastic Recreation
Public buildings of the ‘Gay Nineties’ and early twentieth century provid-
ed another form of advertising, a celebration of collective spirit that used
dynamic modern forms and technologies. Local communities sometimes
initiated the effort. When St Louis proposed neighbourhood centres in
addition to a City Beautiful civic centre, Henry Wright’s 1907 prototype
included a library, fire/police station, settlement house, model tenement
and public market complex. One such example survives in the Czech
working-class neighbourhood of Soulard.32 Nothing, however, matched
7 1 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
the potential of Frank Lloyd Wright’s brilliant 1913 proposal for a model
suburb outside Chicago. Wright used a sequence of parks and play-
grounds near the centre to weave together a rich assortment of modern
public buildings. His specifications included a school, library, gymnasium,
theatre, cinema, art museum and ‘a domestic science group’. This
indoor/outdoor complex provided a common ground for residents from
different social classes and house types, ranging from spacious single-
family dwellings to small two-family workers’ houses and apartment
buildings for single people near the public-transit station. The pro-
gramme brief had not asked for this mix of incomes and house types, nor
for the assortment of activities. They signalled Wright’s deep and abiding
commitment to social landscapes, a critical though never realized context
for his virtuoso private dwellings.
The Chicago City Club had initiated the ideas competition that led to
Wright’s proposal. (His was a non-competitive entry, since, he
explained, he was otherwise bound to win.) Like other civic groups
around the country, the City Club sponsored discussions, exhibitions
and various projects to enhance the public realm. Public baths, libraries,
gymnasia, schools and parks appeared in cities and small towns.
Women’s clubs were especially active, and, while their facilities were usu-
ally quite traditional in appearance, modern buildings sometimes
matched the cosmopolitan purpose that defined the early century. These
clubs offered an important place for businesswomen to socialize. The
programmes usually extended more broadly, including special resi-
dences for working women of different classes, notably Chicago’s
Eleanor Clubs. Julia Morgan built hundreds of clubs and collective resi-
dences for the ywca and Emanuel Sisterhood, as well as women’s hotels,
hospitals and nursing homes.33
Frank Lloyd Wright,
model suburb for the
outskirts of Chicago
designed for the
Chicago City Club,
1913.
Hazel Waterman,
Wednesday Club, San
Diego, California,
1910–11.
7 3 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
Churches, too, explored new social and artistic agendas. The progres-
sive movement re-energized American Protestantism, infusing many
congregations with a sense of worldly responsibility. Evangelical ‘audito-
rium churches’ in large cities provided a precedent for today’s
mega-churches with their large-scale, dramatic interiors for charismatic
ministers together with adjacent social rooms, sports facilities, and lec-
ture halls for outreach programmes among the working classes. Small
suburban churches struck a more restrained liberal chord in liturgy and
sometimes in architecture. Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park (1905–8)
is concrete, cubic and rather stark, uncannily similar to the Larkin
Building. The interior spaces surprise us with their visual and emotion-
al intensity. The spare geometries of the church ‘temple’ harked back to
early Christianity, as did an adjoining auditorium and social hall for
‘friendly gathering’. Bernard Maybeck’s First Church of Christ Scientist
in Berkeley, California (1909–11), is characteristically more exuberant,
mixing hand-carved neo-Gothic tracery with industrial materials such
as exposed concrete, cement tiles and factory windows. Maybeck was a
mystical modernist, a fitting designer for this relatively new religion.
Settlement houses provided another site for intense community
life. Social settlements began in London in the 1880s, large coopera-
tive houses in poor urban neighbourhoods where residents, principally
college-educated single women, fostered close human contact with
nearby residents as a basis for professional services, political representa-
tion and expanded social knowledge. By 1910 the United States had 400
settlements. The most famous was Chicago’s Hull House, established in
Bernard Maybeck,
First Church of Christ
Scientist, Berkeley,
California, 1909–11. 
7 4
1889 under the leadership of Jane Addams, a social activist who helped
achieve the first juvenile court, compulsory education laws and protec-
tive labour legislation. Addams defined settlementsas ‘an attempt to
express the meaning of life in terms of life itself, its forms of activity’.34
Architects Allen and Irving Pond cross-programmed public and private
realms in their adaptive reuse of a former mansion for Hull House. By
1912 the complex of twelve buildings encompassed an entire block. The
Labor Museum celebrated the heritage of local immigrant groups; Hull
House had the nation’s first Little Theatre and the Jane Club, a coop-
erative residence for working women. Kindergartens, clinics, clubs,
classrooms and bathing facilities were interspersed with coffee houses,
dining rooms and sundry meeting places, which attracted more than a
thousand local and international visitors each week.
Chicago’s Arts and Crafts Society met at Hull House and shared its
commitments. While most such groups idealized handicrafts, this contin-
gent embraced industry, convinced (like the German Werkbund) that the
artist’s conception of beauty could help overcome oppressive working
conditions and poor-quality products. Frank Lloyd Wright delivered his
first manifesto there in 1901, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’. Machines
could be tools for artistic and democratic advancement, he contended, but
a machine aesthetic was not itself the incarnation of progress. Only a
modern architecture of ‘mutual education’ could direct technological
energies to free artists from tedious work, improve the lives of ordinary
people and humanize ‘this greatest of machines, a great city’.35
John Dewey took Hull House as his ‘working model’ for social cen-
tres that provided for adult education and public forums. Boston’s Ford
Hall, founded in 1908, was geared to ‘town meetings’. Frederic Howe
directed the larger People’s Institute in New York, where a thousand
working-class men might debate topics from municipal socialism to
feminism. Rochester, New York, used its schools for this purpose in 1907;
within five years more than three hundred educational facilities were
doubling as community centres for neighbourhood activism. Schools
were undergoing a significant change, based in part on Dewey’s ideas
about multiple forms of learning. Needing to expand with millions of
immigrant children, many unfamiliar with modern city life, hundreds of
new urban schools were designed to train minds and bodies with more
flexible classrooms, assembly halls, theatres, cafeterias and special areas
for manual or vocational training and domestic science. Gymnasiums
and playgrounds now became fundamental components of American
educational facilities. The Chicago-based architect Dwight Perkins
incorporated such facilities into more informal, single-storey suburban
schools that often included open-air classrooms.
7 5 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
7 6
Reed & Stem and
Warren & Wetmore,
Grand Central
Terminal ‘City’, New
York City, 1903–13,
section.
Other kinds of urban buildings also had to accommodate much larger,
more diverse crowds of people and activities. Early twentieth-century busi-
ness hotels like New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and Chicago’s La Salle were
immense, and their disparate facilities carefully organized. Railway termi-
nals were complex spatial systems behind their ornate Beaux-Arts façades.
New York set the model with McKim Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station
(1902–10), occupying two full city blocks. The new Grand Central terminal
(1903–13) encompassed even more space and activities in every direction.
A major accident in 1902 propelled the state legislature to require electri-
fication and underground tracks. This prompted William Wilgus, the
railroad’s chief engineer and soon its vice-president, to carry out an ambi-
tious double vision over the decade 1903–1913, all the while continuing
service. The architects Reed & Stem and the engineers Warren & Wetmore
designed a vast new station surrounded by ‘Terminal City’, a complex of
adjacent hotels and offices interconnected via subterranean concourses
and overhead traffic viaducts, as well as street access. In addition, by
moving the noisy, polluting tracks to the north underground, Wilgus
transformed 19 hectares of land into the prestigious Park Avenue.
Electric power was essential to the
new public architecture and to metro-
politan urbanism. New York’s Broadway
was first called the ‘Great White Way’ in
the 1890s, paying tribute to the electric
lights and illuminated advertising that
amazed visitors with new, ephemeral
spectacles. As cities shifted from private
to public ownership of utilities between
1900 and 1920, they extended electricity
not only geographically but also tempo-
rally. An ‘Architecture of the Night’
encouraged entertainment-oriented businesses to stay open around the
clock. Major firms collaborated to transform Main Streets around the
country into ‘White Ways’, eager to create an aura of progress and glam-
our. With key ‘sights’ illuminated, both locals and tourists learned to
comprehend the modern metropolis in terms of exciting architecture.
Animated and illuminated amusement zones anticipated today’s
notion of Modernism as spontaneous events. Rem Koolhaas’s book
Delirious New York (1978) praised Brooklyn’s Coney Island for a ‘New
Technology of the Fantastic’ in decidedly unserious, surreal settings
where the audience became part of the performance.36 Coney Island’s
kinesthetic pleasures attracted more than a million visitors a day,
especially young people from every social class, eager to suspend con-
ventional settings and rules of conduct’. George C. Tilyou opened
Stepplechase Park in 1897, borrowing directly from the Chicago
Exposition’s Midway. Luna Park followed in 1903. Co-owner Frederic
Thompson had studied architecture, which, he claimed, gave him ‘all the
license in the world’ to create ‘a dream world, perhaps a nightmare world
– where all is bizarre and fantastic’.37
Most progressive reformers wanted wholesome forms of leisure and
disapproved of idle pleasures like amusement parks, which nonetheless
proliferated on the peripheries of many large cities. Fears about chaotic
abandon misunderstood these settings, where the illusion of freedom
concealed an elaborate system that carefully orchestrated technologies,
spatial organization and desired effects. American modern environ-
ments often exhibit a double theme of control and liberation. Simon
Paten, the pragmatist economist and social theorist, recognized that
Coney Island was in fact standardized, disciplined and conformist
beneath the gaudy veneer and titillating rides, providing a ‘safety valve’
in the volatile economies of contemporary life.38
Luna Park at Coney
Island, Brooklyn, 
New York, c. 1905,
postcard. 
7 7 P r o g r e s s i ve A r c h i t e c t u r e s , 1 8 9 4 – 1 9 1 8
New York, photograph
by Walker Evans, 1929.
The ‘Roaring Twenties’, the ‘Jazz Age’, ‘Metropolitanism’ – under these
and other exuberant labels the United States became a potent cultural
force in the world in the 1920s, matching its new-found military and
economic dominance at the end of World War One. Sheldon Cheney’s
The New World Architecture (1930) described the American tempo of
innovation: ‘What seemed insurgent and revolutionary two years ago is
now the accepted and standard . . . so fast moves “Modernism”.’1 The
term Modernism was everywhere, from business and advertising to liter-
ature, painting, dance, music, photography and architecture. For the
first time in American history the majority of the population lived in
cities, and urbanity encouraged a delirious pace of experimentation,
especially in New York. Everything was purportedly up-to-date in
Kansas City and Cleveland, too, and certainly in Los Angeles. The 
suburbanite William Carlos Williams cried: ‘Back into the city!/
Nowhere/The subtle! Everywhere the electric!’2
Like the metropolis with its dynamic, unpredictable amalgams of
people and ideas, American Modernism tended to dissolve categories
like High and Low, spurring lively debates about form and programme.
Cosmopolitan American architectsand artists embraced multiple
Modernisms, eschewing any one true path or doctrinaire manifesto. The
Brickbuilder became Architectural Forum in 1917, signalling the impor-
tance of debate as well as a shift from masonry details to business acu-
men. By 1930 the aia convention was asserting a common ground
among disparate tendencies by criticizing any ‘crystallized vocabulary’,
whether the ‘static and inorganic quality of tradition [or] the new
European theology’.3 Americans still tend towards such pluralism, an
asset for engaging difference, but a hindrance when everything seems
relative or purportedly equal.
The mood was confident, but not isolationist. ‘Paris is no longer the
capital of Cosmopolis’, wrote one returnee in 1919. ‘New York has
become the battleground of modern civilization.’4 Americans had
become knowledgeable about contemporary European avant-gardes in
c h a p t e r t h r e e
Electric Modernities, 1919–1932
the arts with the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Architecture followed
in the early 1920s. The Journal of the American Institute of Architects first
showed Le Corbusier’s work in 1923, the same year that Architectural
Record reviewed his Vers une architecture. In 1927, Jane Heap, editor of
the Little Review, one of many experimental ‘little magazines’ of the
1920s, sponsored a popular Machine-Age Exposition in a small
Manhattan gallery which showed industrial objects and Russian
Constructivist paintings alongside photographs of American and
European buildings.5
Given the era’s reverence for business, relatively few architects tried to
challenge conventions or address problematic urban conditions. ‘Our
modern architecture is frankly commercial’, contended the critic Edwin
Park, part of ‘the vulgar turbulent vortex of democratic industrial life’.
As if anticipating Rem Koolhaas, Harvey Wiley Corbett expressed full
confidence that consumerist values were inherently progressive. Keenly
aware of competition from builders, construction-contractor firms and
mail-order-plan companies, the profession emphasized skills in ‘prob-
lem-solving’ and design research, eschewing the pure incarnations of
‘objectivity’ – what the Germans called Sachlichkeit. This new generation
knew how to compile the latest functional data on a given problem,
explained the Record, how to ‘systematize’ it graphically, then ‘translate
these purposes into buildings’.6
Américanisme, americanismo, Amerikanismus, even Soviet
amerikanizm testify to Europeans’ fascination with this business-orient-
ed functionalism and their angst about its underlying values. Some out-
spoken Americans were equally critical. Frederick Ackerman, a socialist
architect, studied economics with Thorstein Veblen at the New School in
New York, then joined the short-lived Technical Alliance, whose mem-
bers called themselves ‘technocrats’ – the first group in history to use the
term, which to them meant an elite with advanced technological know-
how. (Veblen was ‘Chief Engineer’ for this ‘soviet of engineers’ who
hoped to overthrow capitalism through expertise aligned with ‘the
instinct of workmanship’.)7 Ackerman criticized his fellow-architects’
subservience to capitalism through ‘profit-induced fashions’, including
that of the emergent modernist aesthetic. ‘Commercialism is a new
God,’ he declared, one that ‘destroys human lives, values and environ-
ments’.8 Far from being an outsider, Ackerman voiced his opinions in
major architectural journals. Despite the Red Scare that followed the
Russian Revolution in 1917, American architects of the time were willing
to discuss a full spectrum of political ideologies.
Imagery in every sort of medium responded to the changes wrought
by the hyper-commercialism of the 1920s. American photographers, fas-
8 0
cinated by the fast-changing built environment, usually juxtaposed old
and new or muted the abstraction of their European counterparts, occa-
sionally experimenting with the simultaneity or ‘interpenetration’ of
viewpoints in montages that supposedly captured the ambiguities of
modern life. In any case, the professional architectural press confined
almost all photographs to autonomous portfolios of soft pictorialism.
Modern architectural drawings followed three prevailing trends. One
emphasized dramatic angles and massing – notably Hugh Ferriss’s
smouldering images, which seemed to cry out for bold action. Another
drew upon the syncopated rhythms of jazz for Art Deco and streamlined
vehicles for Moderne commercial buildings. A third evoked the preci-
sion of statistics, charts and specifications captured in Le Corbusier’s
saying: ‘The American engineers overwhelm with their calculations.’9
Diagrams, too, became increasingly sophisticated, using the virtual
space of the page to relate intellectual and social propositions, another
process of abstraction. Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Plan
defined such relations in terms of walking distance, while the Chicago
School of Sociology used concentric zones to reify spatial theories that
suggested how the flow of capital in real estate, industry and finance
affected residential patterns.10 Within a few years, Architectural Record
would adapt these diagrams. Architectural Graphic Standards epitomized
the scientific line. A compendium of data and simple drawings first pub-
lished in 1932, it became an indispensable tool almost immediately, the
Robert Park and
Ernest Burgess,
Concentric zone 
theory diagram of
prototypal modern
American city from
The City (1925), left,
and A. Lawrence
Kocher, ‘Typical City’
diagram of concentric
housing zones from
Architectural Record
(November 1927),
right.
8 1 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
bible of normative practice throughout the world. Frederick Ackerman
had provided the vision for his two young associates. His foreword
praised the translation of the ‘simple language of facts’ into images.11 He
used the term data in its technical sense to mean quantitative relation-
ships between production, materials and human needs, urging archi-
tects to engage in materials production, programming, planning and
regulations rather than passively accepting what already existed. Only
later would some critics recognize that ‘abstract visualization’ dehuman-
ized workers into mere statistics.12
Even mainstream journals now invoked science. American Architect
added a Department of Architectural Engineering in 1917. Architectural
Record began a ‘new chapter’ a decade later with the declaration:
‘Modernism is an attitude of mind – the scientific attitude.’ Readers were
advised to adopt ‘the research method of science – observation, hypoth-
esis, deduction, experimental verification.’13 The moving force was A.
Lawrence Kocher, managing editor from 1928 to 1938, simultaneously a
preservationist at Colonial Williamsburg and the architect of striking
modern buildings, notably the Aluminaire House with his partner
Albert Frey in Syosset, New York (1931). The editorial board included
significant modernists like Knud Lönberg-Holm, Henry Wright, Henry-
Russell Hitchcock and Douglas Haskell. The Record also inaugurated a
‘Technical News and Research’ section that analysed a new ‘Problem’
every month, providing extensive data about current materials, meth-
ods, costs and other ‘performance-based’ criteria. The Associated Business
Papers awarded this feature and its creator, the architect Robert Davison,
first prize for editorial excellence in 1929. Historian and critic Henry-
Russell Hitchcock praised Kocher’s work, predicting that America
seemed ready to produce the ‘most individual and characteristic new
architecture’.14
Hitchcock’s 1929 book, Modern Architecture, explored over a century
of advances on two continents. He lauded Frank Lloyd Wright as the
incarnation of a ‘New Tradition’, but saw the future in the bold formal
experiments of three ‘New Pioneers’: Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and J.J.P. Oud. Increasingly disturbed by the wide-ranging diversi-
ty of architecture in the us, Hitchcockfelt a need for one controlling
style. Philip Johnson, a wealthy young aesthete who shared those con-
cerns, contended that Europe had already achieved an architecture that
was ‘unified and inclusive, not fragmentary and contradictory’.15
Johnson was searching for a cause. He would take up fascism and other
right-wing movements in the late 1930s before going to architecture
school and then continuously renewing his role as a polemicist, indeed
a pundit. Few individuals anywhere have anticipated or directed the 
8 2
8 3 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
currents of change in architecture with his distinctive combination of
power and impertinence.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr, Director of New York’s fledgling Museum of
Modern Art (moma), persuaded Hitchcock to revise his text into a short
book and exhibition in collaboration with Johnson. They christened the
project ‘Modern Architecture’ as if theirs was the only legitimate use of
the term. Barr coined the catchier phrase ‘International Style’, an even
more all-encompassing mantle. This was in part a reference to the
International Congresses for Modern Architecture (ciam), founded in
1928. European aesthetics also responded to social conditions, such as
the rise of pacifism and social-democratic governments, intent upon
remaking cities after World War One and providing services for work-
ing-class populations. The avant-garde were fascinated by modern con-
struction technologies; ‘laboratory’ materials like concrete, steel and
glass; and smooth, unornamented surfaces. Yet today’s historians rightly
question the inherent unity and progressive social agenda of what
came to be called the Modern Movement. Some architects insisted that
functional considerations, whether scientific or political, determined
their designs, while others gave priority to artistic and emotional expres-
sionism. Claiming to distill an incontestable worldwide phenomenon,
the moma Modern Architecture exhibit of 1932 made its case by focusing
exclusively on work that fit the curators’ formal criteria.
Two official publications accompanied the moma exhibit: a formal
catalogue entitled Modern Architecture and The International Style:
Architecture since 1922, a pithy synopsis of ideas with the same illustra-
tions. Both codified Modernism in terms of three ‘principles’: volume
rather than mass; regularity without axial symmetry; and strict aversion
to applied ornament – in other words, rigid formal rules based on
abstract spatial relations. Hitchcock and Johnson believed that
American architecture needed discipline, not individualism, and cer-
tainly not social purpose. They discreetly acknowledged that modern
architecture was ‘clearly distinguishable’ from one country to another.
Needing to include some American examples if only to legitimize the
international claim, the selection favoured recent émigrés like William
Lescaze and Richard Neutra. Although Barr detested Raymond Hood as
a false, profit-driven opportunist, he made the cut. moma’s high priests
ridiculed almost all the skyscrapers of the 1920s and early 1930s as the
‘crude’ products of ‘confused’, ‘half-modern’ commercial ‘impresarios’
who would surely be hostile to aesthetic reform.16
Low-cost housing reform, a fundamental concern for most
Europeans, was relegated to an addendum to the books and to a back
room at the exhibition overseen by Lewis Mumford and Catherine
Bauer. Hitchcock would look back twenty years later, slightly embarrassed
by the ‘narrow . . . condescending . . . puristic’ absolutism of that youth-
ful polemic.17 In fact, his second thoughts had appeared even earlier,
when he had produced books and exhibitions on Richardson and
Wright, nineteenth-century American ‘vernacular’ architecture and pat-
tern books. These subjects, innovative in their own terms, had inspired
Continental modernists. Hitchcock sought unsuccessfully to counter the
myth, still firmly entrenched today, that a ‘design migration’ had
brought Modernism from Europe to a backward nation.
For too long the 1932 moma exhibition has been lauded as the defin-
ing point in the history of American modern architecture. In fact, it had
a limited impact on both the public and the profession. Most critics of
the time complained that it was both narrow-minded and reductively
formalist, exorcizing any social and political aspirations. The exhibition
had several venues outside New York, often in department stores. Meant
to be didactic, it was really just a label – indeed a ‘fashion show’, wrote
Knud Lönberg-Holm in Shelter.18 The curators expunged diverse exper-
iments on every continent and reduced the us to a caricature, true in
some ways but far too all-encompassing, that of an ignorant and purely
commercial wasteland in desperate need of guidance. The 1920s were far
more interesting than we have been led to believe.
Towering Commerce
The decade began with the Chicago Tribune’s announcement of an inter-
national competition for its new headquarters. This was above all a bril-
liant marketing strategy, especially since the site was one of the first
properties in the expansion of the city’s central business district along
North Michigan Avenue, made possible by a 1920 bridge across the
Chicago River. The newspaper’s public-relations department pro-
claimed a lofty civic purpose of educating the public about architectur-
al history and Modernism. They leavened the missionary zeal with occa-
sional cartoon spoofs. Publicity continued for several years, even after the
announcement of a winner in 1922. The businessmen who dominated
the jury liked Howells’ and Hood’s Gothic-draped skyscraper. Its
innovations – novel wind-bracing with diagonal structures, use of pub-
lic-transit tunnels to free the street from excavation and storage – were
independent of the architectural design. Many people, then and now,
preferred Eliel Saarinen’s ‘enchanted mountain’, which took second
place. Far from a martyr, Saarinen immigrated to the us a year later, a
move sponsored by the Tribune.19 Americans eagerly absorbed his
scheme as an expression of progressive design. Western Architect, based
8 4
in Chicago, adopted an abstracted version as its official logo. The com-
petition was not a failure or a retreat, as has often been charged, for it
stimulated local and international debate about multiple possibilities for
skyscraper design.
Today’s modernists no longer disdain commercial buildings. Many
architects now acknowledge the pleasures of Art Deco undisturbed by
its popular appeal, its florid surface ornament and its overt commercial-
ism. (This certainly does not validate the recent surge of facile adapta-
tions and outright copies.) Yet ‘Art Deco’ is a concept of recent vintage.
‘Moderne’, ‘modernist’ and ‘modernistic’ were the descriptive labels in
the 1920s and ’30s, first for decorative objects, then for a smooth, synco-
pated geometric architecture with visibly machine-made surfaces, typi-
cally adorned with polychrome ornament. The term ‘Art Deco’ only
arrived in the 1960s with renewed interest in the legendary 1925
Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.20
American Art Deco was not mere imitation, since the first example
predates the 1925 exposition: New York’s Barclay-Vesey, designed by
Ralph Walker and completed in 1923 for the New York Telephone
Company. Cities all over the country (and soon all over the world)
quickly set out to boost their images with brilliant new towers, such as
Detroit’s Guardian Building (1929), the Atlantic Richfield Building in
Los Angeles (1929), Seattle’s Olympic Tower (1931), and the Kansas City
Power and Light Company Building (1931). Houston marked its new sta-
tus as the largest city in Texas with a construction surge that included
the Gulf Building (1929), based on Saarinen’s second-place proposal for
Chicago. Atlanta’s City Hall (1930), another such appropriation, is one of
several governmental skyscrapers of the decade.
These architects paid no attention to structural honesty or restraint,the hallmarks of orthodox Modernism. They took a different path
towards modernity, exploring visual perception and ephemeral special
effects, qualities of considerable interest to today’s designers. Herbert
Croly praised the ‘Architectural Effects’ that could be achieved through
colour and light, especially the fantastic illusory settings that emerged at
night. The experience may have disturbed the puritanical gatekeepers of
Eliel Saarinen,
abstract drawing of
second-place Chicago
Tribune competition
entry, 1922, cover
page and frontispiece
for Western Architect
(1926).
8 5 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
Howe & Lescaze,
Philadelphia Savings
Fund Society Tower,
1928–31.
modern architecture, but it enthralled those in other arts. ‘Here is our
poetry,’ wrote Ezra Pound, usually a critic of American culture, ‘for we
have pulled down the stars to our will.’21
Skyscrapers were money-making machines. Speedy construction and
resonant imagery helped determine design. Then as now, corporate
executives liked façades that called attention to themselves. Holabird &
Root (sons of the Chicago School giants) adapted Saarinen’s Tribune
entry for the Chicago Daily News Building (1925–9), adding a public
plaza that stepped down to the river. Raymond Hood’s modern towers
embraced New York’s dense vivacity. He accentuated the height of his
Daily News Building (1925–9) with the illusion of vertical stripes in
white glazed brick offset by dark horizontal bands. The enigmatic black-
glass lobby attracted so many tourists that another entrance had to be
created. Hood’s Radiator Building (1924) gleamed in black and gold,
while his McGraw-Hill Building (1931) shifted from blue-green at the
base to an ethereal blue at the crown, as if dematerializing into the sky.
The ‘spirited struggle’ for ‘experimental eclecticism’ of Ely Jacques
Kahn’s dazzling glass-and-polychrome skyscrapers helped define corpor-
ations and specialized districts like the new central business district of
midtown Manhattan.22
New York’s Chrysler Building (1930) marked a new stage in Art Deco
spectacles. William Reynolds, a speculative developer and the creator of
Holabird & Root,
Chicago Daily News
Building, Chicago,
1925–9.
8 6
Coney Island’s Dreamland, mounted an intense publicity campaign
about William Van Alen’s 77-storey design sheathed in expensive stainless
steel. When the auto magnate Walter P. Chrysler bought the proposal in
1928, Van Alen added new ornament based on hubcaps and a magnificent
crown of illuminated arcs. He saved the most dramatic gesture until the
last moment in late October 1929. Everything seemed complete until a
‘vertex’ spire, 56 metres high, secretly constructed and hidden inside, rose
over the course of a few hours to make this the world’s tallest building, if
only for a few months until the Empire State topped it with 86 storeys
and a zeppelin mooring mast. Critics condemned the stunt, but the
Chrysler became a beloved symbol of New York, recently dubbed
‘Rhapsody in Chrome’.23
The iconic skyscraper for modern historians is the 32-storey
Philadelphia Savings Fund Society tower, a design that evolved over sev-
eral years. George Howe started with a sleek tower in 1928. Then his new
partner, the young Swiss architect William
Lescaze, made the scheme more ‘correct’ –
i.e., horizontal. When the frustrated client,
James Willcox, demanded a resolution in
1931, the asymmetrical design brilliantly syn-
thesized the horizontal banding of the floors
and the vertical thrust of the tower.
Materials and fenestration mark the differ-
ent sectors inside. Advertisements declared
that there was ‘Nothing More Modern’ than
the building’s numerous technological
advances, such as dropped ceilings of
acoustical tile that provide ‘silver stillness’
and hermetically sealed windows for ‘com-
plete environmental control’. The scarlet
neon psfs sign on the roof screens cooling
towers for an early air-conditioning system.
Willcox praised the ‘ultra-practical’ result.24
Immense mixed-use complexes were pro-
moted as ‘cities within a city’ that benefited
the public at large. Walter Ahlschlager built
such enclaves in Chicago, New York,
Memphis, Detroit and Oklahoma City.
Cincinnati’s Carew Complex (1929–31) fea-
tured a dramatic, almost Baroque sequence of
public spaces leading from a huge hotel to an
adjacent office tower, testifying to
Walter Ahlschlager
with Delano &
Aldrich, Carew Tower
and Fountain Square,
Cincinnati, Ohio,
1929–31, postcard of
illuminated night
view. 
8 8
8 9 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
Ahlschlager’s experience as a theatre architect. A through-block shopping
arcade made shopping up-to-date with links to department stores. The 25-
storey parking garage was one of only two ‘automated’ facilities in a down-
town skyscraper at that time.25
For many people New York’s Rockefeller Center still embodies cos-
mopolitan American modernity, but it scarcely looked that way early on.
A private donor, John D. Rockefeller, Jr, had assembled the midtown site
in 1928, calling it Metropolitan Square for commerce enhanced by a new
opera house. The multi-block complex required a team, the Associated
Architects, that combined the reliable firm of Reinhard & Hofmeister
with two more daring consultants, Harvey Wiley Corbett and Raymond
Hood. Hood envisaged ‘A City under a Single Roof ’ as a network of tow-
ers connected by upper-level walkways and subterranean tunnels, which
soon became a more feasible underground concourse and rooftop ter-
races. The scene drew inspiration from nearby Grand Central’s Terminal
City. When the Metropolitan Opera withdrew in 1929, a more popular
art form, the Radio Corporation of America (rca), took its pivotal site
with a thin, 70-storey office slab, and the site became Radio City.
The name Rockefeller Center came with the gala opening in 1932,
evoking financial stability through its patron’s name. The sequence of
public and semi-public spaces had adapted to a series of unexpected
economic contingencies and now seemed harmonious. Yet one centrifu-
gal space came much later in response to the failure of the shops in the
sunken plaza. Four years after the opening, Hood reconsidered the lower
level and decided to create an open-air skating rink with restaurants to
both sides. Public response remained mixed. Lewis Mumford attacked
the ‘organized chaos’ for years, condemning the ‘bad guesses’ and
‘grandiose inanities’ of this ‘paper architecture’. Then suddenly, like most
people, he grew fond of Rockefeller Center, calling it ‘a serene eyeful’ in
1939. He never explained his change of heart and always lamented the
private ownership of public space.26
Mumford was not alone in stressing the negative side of modern
public spaces, housing and workplaces. Tensions built everywhere during
the boom years of the 1920s. Upton Sinclair coined the term ‘white-
collar’ in 1919 for the fast-growing stratum of office employees who
distinguished themselves from ‘blue-collar’ factory workers and identi-
fied strongly with their companies. Professional managers continued to
transfer the concept of work flow from the factory to the clerical pool,
insisting that maximum visibility in a large open space increased produc-
tion and loyalty. Lee Galloway used a photo of the atrium in Wright’s
1906 Larkin Building as the frontispiece for his 1919 book Office
Management. ‘American plan’ offices contrasted the central holding pens
for female clerks and typists with private rooms for male managers,
painstakingly gradated by size and status. New technologies also affect-
ed office buildings. Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (hvac)
controls advanced with ‘manufactured weather’, internal systems that
freed the façade from its role as mediator between interior and exterior
environments.27
The ‘Hawthorne Experiment’ turned managers’ attention away from
environmental improvements. A team of social scientists set out to
measure how illumination levels affectedfemale workers at Chicago’s
Hawthorne Works in 1927. Confounded by inconclusive results, they
brought in new consultants who experimented with other variables. In
1932 the Harvard psychologist Elton Mayo announced that ambient
environments are not as significant for well-being and productivity as
teamwork, learning and even the researchers’ attention to the employ-
ees’ responses. This came to be called ‘the Hawthorne effect’.28 While
9 1 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
Rockefeller Center,
plan of concourse
level of main complex.
Rienhard &
Hofmeister with
Harvey Wiley Corbett
and Raymond Hood,
RCA Tower and
Rockefeller Center,
New York City,
1928–32.
there is still debate about the 
phenomenon, it prompted ana-
lysts to focus on work relations
more than architectural reforms.
Industry too shifted towards
scientific research in the 1920s.
Albert Kahn helped expand Henry
Ford’s vision with a massive new
plant on the River Rouge outside
Detroit, near the original factory.
First used during World War One,
some 100,000 men soon worked
on the sprawling 1,000-acre site
that would eventually encompass
almost 100 buildings, the largest
and most famous factory in the
world. Major advances in Ford’s
plate-glass factory (1922) would
have repercussions in architectural
windows, while the Engineering
Laboratory (1925) helped control
the production and processing for
virtually every component.
Recognizing that these iconic
images of modernity helped promote his ‘brand’, Ford commissioned
brilliant paintings and photographs of Kahn’s plants.
Other companies engineered special research centres as well. Unlike
earlier university-based facilities, corporate research and development
(r&d) buildings were free to explore daring designs as a form of adver-
tising. Engineering and chemical corporations promoted new research
laboratories as expressions of scientific innovations, even as they tight-
ened security over what happened inside. One of the most dazzling, the
A. O. Smith Company’s Research and Engineering Building in
Milwaukee (1930), featured a bold façade in aluminium and glass. A par-
allel increase in scale in other fields tended towards blank façades,
notably the parabolic steel shed for what was then the largest building in
the world, the Goodyear Airship Dock in Akron, Ohio (1930).
(Hitchcock belatedly praised it in 1951.) The unaesthetic aesthetics of
this era were geared to expansion, flexibility and control, signalling the
emergence of r&d in corporate science.
Holabird & Root, 
A. O. Smith Research
and Engineering
Building, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, 1930.
Ford plant at River
Rouge, Michigan, pho-
tograph by Charles
Sheeler, 1922.
9 3 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
Visionary Cities
Seeking to press beyond commissions for individual buildings, many
architects drew schemes for the modern cityscapes they hoped to see.
Richard Neutra worked on his imaginary scheme for ‘Rush City
Reformed’ between 1925 and 1930, taking Southern California as an
archetype. Touting the slogan ‘Ameliorate, not agitate’, Neutra juxta-
posed anonymous prefabricated housing slabs and towers with lively
drive-in shopping. Fast-moving superhighways, bus stations and air-
ports provided for the continuous ‘transfer’ of human energy, a major
theme in the project’s initial publication in his Wie baut Amerika? (‘How
Does America Build?’) (1927). Reaction was broadly positive, including
Hitchock’s acclaim that ‘Creation is again . . . a possibility, and nowhere
more so than in America.’29 Raymond Hood preferred a denser urban
landscape based on New York’s skyscrapers, which he imagined as a
metropolitan concentration of towers or strung along a remarkable
expansion of the city’s bridges. Harvey Wiley Corbett envisioned
Raymond Hood, ‘City
Within a City’, 1929,
aerial view. Drawing
from Contemporary
American Architects:
Raymond M. Hood
(1931).
9 4
Manhattan’s streets as multi-level traffic systems. All American visions
of the future relied on far-reaching transportation infrastructures.
The Regional Plan Association of America (rpaa), founded in New
York in 1923, was much broader in purview. This small multi-discipli-
nary group anticipated many of the environmental and social concerns
of the early twenty-first century. The rpaa was sentimental about small-
town America (as depicted in Mumford’s 1939 film, The City), but it con-
nected housing, social services, infrastructure and conservation as nec-
essary factors in regional development. If Mumford was their prime
spokesperson, the ‘ecologist’ Benton MacKaye embodied the rpaa’s key
ambitions. MacKaye was among the first to use the word environment,
understood to extend from metropolitan centres to wildernesses and
even virtual realms, a shifting ‘flow’ of ideas, images and activities that
affected change at many levels. Influenced by the pragmatists, MacKaye
spoke of ‘visualizing’ ongoing changes through various media.30
Another group with a similar name would continue to affect develop-
ment. The Regional Plan Association of New York and Environs (rpa)
enjoyed a full decade of research funded by more than a million dollars
from the Russell Sage Foundation. Its conclusions and projections
appeared in two hefty volumes illustrated by architects with divergent
modern proclivities, and an eight-volume statistical survey of the region
in 1929–31. Robert Moses and the Port Authority would implement many
rpa proposals from the 1930s until the early 1960s: Manhattan as a global
city geared to finance, luxury housing and culture; the gentrification of
Harlem and the Lower East Side; the dispersal of industry outside the city;
a dramatic increase in leisure facilities as the exemplars of modernity; and
sprawling residential suburbs for specific classes. This last point remained
vague since the rpa’s pro-business vision led the group to drop a pro-
posed ninth report on housing as overly controversial, since the data
revealed class inequalities.31 Those same ambitious but biased priorities
drive today’s rpa and other groups like it around the country.
The Many Faces of Modern Housing
The acute need for housing after World War One forced up costs.
Presidents Coolidge and Hoover championed home ownership, hoping
to stimulate the house-building industry, but without pressing it to be
more rational or cost-effective. The resulting increase in production (8
million new units in the 1920s, mostly before 1926) saw the rise of large-
scale ‘developers’ who relied on modern materials and mass production,
usually hidden behind façades that evoked romantic myths of national
heritage, aristocratic ancestry or exotic charm. The 1920s suburbs for the
9 5 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
elite were often carefully planned, including public-transit systems, but
the flood of inexpensive dwellings was usually plagued by shoddy con-
struction and cramped spaces.32 Uniformity and cacophony were less of
an issue than the problems they obscured: laissez-faire municipal gov-
ernments that tolerated poor construction; uncoordinated production
and regulations that inflated costs; dreary house and site plans under
the guise of economy; tensions about social and financial security that
dramatically increased class and racial segregation. The astute Henry
Wright of St Louis deplored the ‘millions of cheap shoddy houses . . .
very distinctive but all alike’.33 Yet he believed that this idiosyncratic
American pattern could generate alternatives by combining new tech-
nologies with careful site plans, staking a claim in between the two
poles of European Modernism, its elegant custom villas and its
Existenzminimum blocks of workers’ housing.
Gifted modern architects won public respect for their private houses,
nowhere more so than in southern California. R. M. Schindler, Neutra,
Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright worked in and around Los
Angeles, sustained by an avant-garde culture of European émigrés andflamboyantly successful Americans.34 Each one developed innovative
concrete systems, adapted to normative construction processes since they
were intended to be mass prototypes. Schindler’s experiments were the
most radical and varied, including tilt-up panels, ‘slab-cast’ and sprayed
gunite. Neutra applied gunite to the delicate steel matrix of the Lovell
Health House (1927–9) and developed a series of prefabrication systems
that stressed ‘lightness of construction’ with concrete aggregates, as well
as a 1930 tensile structure based on the circus tent.35 Driven in part by the
increased price of lumber, Wright took up cheap concrete-block, asking,
‘Why not see what could be done with that gutter-rat?’36
Schindler arrived in Los Angeles in 1919 to supervise Wright’s
Hollyhock House (1921). Originally from Vienna, he had come to
America at the urging of Adolph Loos, then apprenticed to Wright at
Taliesin in Wisconsin. In 1921 Schindler built a communal dwelling on
King’s Road in Hollywood for his family and that of his friend Clyde
Chace. The intricate sequence of shared and private spaces includes
seven distinct outdoor zones. The materials, all left exposed, juxtapose
thin concrete wall panels with redwood ceilings and taut expanses of
lightweight canvas. Schindler described the house as a spatial marriage
of the solid, permanent cave and the improvised, ephemeral tent.
Socially it embraced his wife Pauline’s hope for ‘as democratic a meet-
ing-place as Hull House’.37 Schindler was a committed socialist, but few
of his designs for workers’ colonies or moderate-cost tract houses were
ever realized. Hitchcock and Johnson were put off by his idiosyncratic
Rudolph Schindler,
Schindler-Chace
House, West
Hollywood, California,
1921–2, outdoor patio.
Schindler-Chace
House, plan of house
and gardens.
9 7 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
balance of intuition, invention and social interventions, refusing him a
place in their canon, a slight that wounded Schindler deeply. His princi-
pal reputation remained that of an artist-architect intrigued by
ephemeral planes and interlocking volumes, although in fact his vision
was much larger.
Schindler’s Lovell Beach House (1925–6), another masterpiece of
American Modernism, used five transverse frames in reinforced con-
crete to support the house, literally and figuratively. They generated its
rhythm, provided seismic protection and lifted up the main living area
for majestic views of the ocean. The textures of concrete and untreated
wood were rough and tactile, for this was a primitive shelter, not a
‘machine for living’. The ‘play-court’ in the sand beneath the house
embodied site-specificity and even a primal hearth with its outdoor
fireplace, offset by the asymmetry of a stair up and a ramp down to the
sea. The interior revealed Schindler’s concept of sculptural ‘space
forms’ in a De Stijl-like play of minute details and broad expanses.
Despite its sturdy materials and lavish budget, the house embraced
impermanence, even cheapness, by adapting conventional builders’
materials and methods. Schindler was initially inspired by the functional
pile structures often found in beachfront dwellings – a fact that
intrigued the editors of Popular Mechanics.38
Neutra, another Austrian, arrived in Los Angeles in 1925, also having
apprenticed with Wright, and lived at King’s Road for five years. He
quickly understood that Modernism’s fame – and his own – relied on
Rudolph Schindler,
Lovell Beach House,
Newport Beach,
California, 1925–6.
Richard Neutra, Lovell
Health House, Los
Angeles, 1927–9,
showing construction
of steel frame.
9 8
publicity. Neutra’s magnificent Lovell Health House represents his first
triumph. This was the same Dr Philip Lovell, the charismatic author of
a popular newspaper column on physical and mental fitness, who
turned to Neutra after Schindler had designed his beach house. Perhaps
Lovell recognized a kindred charismatic spirit, since Neutra prescribed a
‘full dosage of environment’ for what he dubbed the ‘Health House’.39
Practical experience with American contractors helped Neutra appro-
priate materials and techniques from commercial buildings: an open-
web steel frame, standardized steel casements, a dramatic double-height
glass wall and slender steel cables from the roof to stabilize the balconies.
European in its geometry, the relation with the landscape makes this an
American house. The steep site was an essential component. The build-
ing proceeds down a rocky hillside, broken by small terraces and a path
to the swimming pool, before terminating in a running track. The house
immediately became the apotheosis of the International Style and a
local landmark, even an advertisement for Lovell. When he invited
readers to see it themselves in 1929, some 15,000 Angelenos took up the
offer.40 The experience profoundly affected Neutra, who continued to
promote an ambient, open-air hedonism as the basis for physiological
and psychological well-being throughout his career, a synthesis he
would later call ‘bio-realism’.
Frank Lloyd Wright relocated to southern California in 1917 and again
on his return from Japan in 1923. Nature posed difficult challenges on the
Richard Neutra at the
foot of his Lovell
Health House. 
1 0 0
Pacific Rim with earthquakes, floods, mudslides, brushfires and parched
desert heat further inland. Wright adopted new materials, notably a tech-
nique his son Lloyd had used for the Bollman House in Hollywood (1922).
Wright père named it the Textile-Block system in reference to the textured
exterior patterns and the reinforcing steel set into grooves inside the
blocks, weaving them together even under seismic pressure. He experi-
mented with a variety of techniques for a ‘kaleidoscopic’ array of clients:
the Hollyhock House for the wealthy theatre patron Aline Barnsdale; the
Alice Millard House (‘La Miniatura’) for a widowed bookseller (1923); a
proposed desert compound for the solitary A. M. Johnson; and several
resort communities that disrupted conventional notions of domesticity.41
Housing research became more systematic all over the country. At
one end were small collective enclaves like Schindler’s and Neutra’s
Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (agic), Frederick
Ackerman’s Technocracy groups, Buckminster Fuller’s Structural Study
Associates and Philadelphia’s Housing Study Guild. At the other end
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Alice Millard House
(‘La Miniatura’),
Pasadena, California,
perspective from the
garden, coloured 
pencil and graphite 
on paper, 1923.
1 0 1 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
were major enterprises like President Herbert Hoover’s Commerce
Department, which standardized building materials, and the
Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory, which devel-
oped stressed-skin plywood panels. Architectural Record’s Robert
Davison became director of a well-funded housing division at the John
B. Pierce Foundation in 1931, overseeing a large staff of designers and
sociologists in the country’s most far-reaching experiments with prefab-
rication. Eager to corner a new market, the Architects’ Small House
Service Bureau, founded in Minneapolis in 1921, generated 250 stock-
plan designs, all historicist in style though adapted to different climates,
available for $6.00 per room.
The architect Clarence Stein convinced a New York financier to form
the limited-dividend City Housing Corporation, another group dedicated
to modern housing – as this group understood the term, with an empha-
sis on site planning and cooperative financing rather than architecture per
se. Respect for English Garden City ideals coalesced with an awareness of
problems caused by the profit-driven American superstructure of finan-
cial institutions, real-estate developers and building
industries. Stein and his partner Henry Wright
designed the first venture, Sunnyside Gardens in
Queens, New York (1924–8), together with Frederick
Ackerman, all members ofthe rpaa. Lewis
Mumford, who became a resident, called it ‘prag-
matic idealism with a vengeance’, contending that
the relatively banal architecture accentuated resi-
dents’ connections to the collective garden-court-
yards and social services.42
Stein and Wright also created Radburn, New
Jersey, intended as a self-sufficient garden commu-
nity, a ‘Town for the Motor Age’. Begun in 1928,
Radburn synthesized various progressive concepts:
a greenbelt, spacious common greenswards, super-
blocks, a differentiated road system and pedestrian
walkways that never crossed vehicular streets.
Ackerman designed many homes and the town
shopping centre. Radburn was planned for diverse
social classes, work possibilities and housing types –
all with attached garages. The Depression reduced
these goals to a pleasant model suburb rather than
a valiant alternative.43
Buckminster Fuller was not an architect, nor
can his designs and polemics be easily classified. He
R. Buckminster Fuller,
Minimum Dymaxion
House, 1929.
1 0 2
emphasized ‘shelter’ as opposed to architecture and derided ‘outdated’
concepts like property ownership, convinced that he could transform
the world by doing ‘more with less’. The press touted his polygonal
Dymaxion House design (1929) of steel and plastic as the prototype
dwelling for the future. (‘Dymaxion’ meant ‘dynamic’ plus ‘maximum
efficiency’.) In characteristically obscure yet prescient language, Fuller
described design as a ‘Check list of the/Universal Design
Requirements/of a Scientific Dwelling Facility–/as a component func-
tion/of a world-encompassing service industry’.44 His 1928 4d manifesto
– a reference to time as the fourth dimension – envisioned an apart-
ment-building variation with a stack of ‘4-d Utility Units’ made of
transparent plastic walls.
Displays of Fuller’s prototypes were quite popular, but only the
Dymaxion car and the prefabricated Dymaxion bathroom unit enjoyed
even minor success. He rarely considered emotions or site planning,
convinced that information and integral processes of change (‘ephemer-
alization’) would lead to progress. His own reputation shows that
process. The aia rejected his offer of rights to the patents for the
Dymaxion House in 1929, passing a resolution that condemned all pre-
fabricated building as ‘peas-in-a-pod reproducible designs’.45 Almost
forty years later, Fuller appeared on the cover of Time with a panoply of
his inventions and the aia awarded him its gold medal.
Some later historians have implied that single-family houses defined
the 1920s, but the new large-scale residential developments also invested
in apartment buildings for cities and suburbs. ‘Rather than eliminating
the home’, explained one book, ‘these new types of multi-dwelling houses
offer a new type of home [based on] convenience.’46 Cosmopolitan apart-
ment buildings flourished, ranging from luxurious to livable, prized today
as ‘pre-war’ buildings. The boom extended everywhere. Grand apartment
towers transformed the character of Chicago, Manhattan and the Bronx.
Nelle Peters became one of the most productive architects in Kansas City
by specializing in apartment buildings. By 1928 multi-unit buildings con-
stituted 53 per cent of new construction in Los Angeles, a region that
according to Architectural Record, enjoyed ‘the most promising new
designs’ for apartments.47
Urban apartment-hotels and ‘bachelor hotels’ attracted single people.
Inexpensive hotels featured compact ‘efficiency’ units, later known as
single-room occupancy (sro); lodging houses were far more spartan
with only cubicles or open floors. In contrast, low-rise, high-density ‘gar-
den apartments’ were popular just outside the dense central areas of
cities. (The self-trained architect Andrew J. Thomas apparently coined
the term.) Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and especially southern
1 0 3 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
California developed many appealing variations on the type.
Confronting a crisis in affordable housing, several states and municipal-
ities helped unions and limited-dividend companies sponsor housing.
Most were cooperative apartment complexes that included communal
meeting rooms, laundries, childcare and expansive outdoor areas. The
Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ projects in the Bronx and Manhattan
are among the most impressive. In 1931 Architectural Record distilled
some of the ways to avoid monotony through staggered site plans for
garden-apartment arrangements.48 Unlike in Europe, all American
housing had to engage client preferences, which meant an emphasis on
irregular massing, soft landscaping, familiar motifs – and garages. All the
same, alarmed about the perceived risk of transitory neighbours, many
cities and elite suburban areas passed restrictive covenants and rigid zon-
ing restrictions that banned everything but single-family houses.
A. Lawrence Kochler
and Albert Frey, 
garden apartments,
various site plans,
from Architectural
Record (April 1931).
1 0 4
Cars, Clubs and Cinemas
Automobiles redefined American public space during the 1920s. Every
city carved out space for parking lots and public garages, also called
‘automobile hotels’. Knud Lönberg-Holm undertook extensive research
for an article on petrol stations in Architectural Record. Bypassing mod-
ernist polemics, he stressed the benefits of easy cleaning, visual unity,
efficient movement and bright signs. Standard Oil of Ohio and Texaco
commissioned standardized modern stations along these lines.49 New
kinds of stores were also geared to automobiles. The first super-
markets were extremely plain, clean designs that combined extensive
parking with vast, non-directional, self-service space inside. Drive-in
markets used eye-catching roofs and signage to grab drivers’ attention.
Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles became a new kind of linear down-
town geared to automobile traffic. Bullock’s Wilshire (1929) was the
first department store to orient its main façade towards the parking.
Meanwhile, suburban shopping centres used packaged themes to pro-
vide social and economic hubs that combined shops with landscaped
areas and parking.
Modern hospitals also adapted to the car with extensive parking and
patient drop-off areas, one piece of a profound shift in biomedical envi-
ronments and clientele. Before World War One, hospitals had principally
served the poor with open charity wards. Doctors saw paying patients
in small offices or visited them at home. Boston’s Lying-In Hospital
(1922) was the first to medicalize childbirth. Now larger, yet compactly
organized within multiple specialized departments, hospitals provided
new models of expertise, efficiency and comfort to attract middle- and
upper-class patients. These up-to-date facilities provided the familiar
hygienic metaphors for modernist aesthetics: surgeries were small, spe-
cialized rooms, unlike the earlier teaching amphitheatres, and sanitized
laboratories became a necessity.
New York’s consolidated Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital inaugurated
the diversified skyscraper facility as an interconnected ‘medical centre’.
Encompassing seven buildings on more than eight hectares in northern
Manhattan, this complex combined a modern research facility, teaching
hospital and general hospital for the surrounding area. The architect
James Gamble Rogers used flow diagrams and technical data to address
what he called the three functional problems for hospital design: control
and collaboration in scientific research, improved hygiene and efficient
circulation systems (principally to facilitate the doctors’ ease of move-
ment). The first stage, begun in 1921 and completed in 1928, drew praise
for the ‘size, simplicity and austerity’ of the astylar towers.50 Building
1 0 5 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
heights, window placement and rooftop solariums were based on thera-
peutic, not aesthetic, considerations. The luxurious Harkness Wing
drew elite patients and a strong donor base. This was the firsthospital
organized around modern laboratories, x-rays and technical monitor-
ing. Within a decade most hospitals were devoting two-thirds of their
floor area to such services.51
Other educational facilities followed the shift to clean lines, open
spaces and specialization. The theories of John Dewey and Maria
Montessori encouraged ‘progressive’ educators to adopt more flexible
classrooms, while the San Francisco school architect John J. Donovan
argued that schools should be geared to the emotional and intellectual
needs of different age groups. Nursery schools and kindergartens for
1 0 6
Alfred Clauss and
George Daub, service
station for the
Standard Oil
Company, Cleveland,
Ohio, 1931, one of a
series of 40.
Lloyd Wright, Yucca-
Vine Market, Los
Angeles, 1928. 
middle-class children showed the strongest evidence of these theories.
Elementary schools were informal and home-like, rarely more than one
storey high, while high schools and the new junior high schools provided
a degree of order and monumentality for adolescents.
The New School for Social Research in New York, founded in 1919,
was oriented towards a progressive ‘new social order’. When the econo-
mist Alvin Johnson became director, he popularized psychoanalysis,
Marxism, modern dance and expressionist drama, commissioning a
new building for continuing education in 1929. Joseph Urban, principally
a theatre and set designer, adapted bold, abstract patterns with great
economy of means. Urban used 90 colours for the interior, the choices
governed by lighting, programmatic codes and what he termed empa-
thetic studies of perception.
The electrifying architecture of entertainment enhanced urban
nightlife. Prohibition encouraged an explosion of new venues for
movies and theatrical performances. New York’s most spectacular
theatres and clubs were concentrated around Times Square, while
Harlem was the epicentre of a ‘Renaissance’ in African-American cul-
ture – especially remarkable in music and dance – that resonated in
1 0 7 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
James Gamble 
Rogers, Columbia-
Presbyterian Medical
Center, New York,
1921–8.
other cities north and south. Some night-
clubs fused modernist imagery with African
motifs in their design as well as perform-
ances. Disproving the idea that brilliant
architecture generates progressive effects,
the patrons were usually whites only.
Hundreds of clubs, cinemas and perform-
ance spaces around the country catered to
segregated African-American audiences,
some grand, others spare. One lavish
ensemble opened in 1914 in Atlanta’s Sweet
Auburn district, variously called the
Auditorium, Pioneer and Royal, alongside
the Odd Fellows Hall. Then, as now, extrav-
agance usually meant highly orchestrated
performances rather than creative experi-
mentation, but audiences were enthralled
by the spectacles.
Vachel Lindsay’s Art of the Moving
Picture (1916) had challenged architects to
seize this new medium as ‘propaganda’ to
publicize new visions of ‘a future
Cincinnati, Cleveland or St Louis . . . Why
not erect our new America?’52 For more
than a decade, that mandate generated
flamboyant ‘palaces’ with fulsome orna-
ment. Palaces legitimated movies as mid-
dle-class culture, erasing the working-class origins of nickelodeons. A
small coterie of architectural firms established distinctive styles to
publicize particular Hollywood studios and their chains of theatres.
Patrons were drawn to ‘Wonder Theatres’ and ‘Atmospherics’ – which
created the illusion of being outdoors, ‘to avoid being boring’,
explained the architect John Eberson.53 Large cities built palaces with
3,000 to 6,000 seats, orchestra pits and elaborate stages for music and
dance performances. The opulent lobbies, often as big as the audito-
riums, might provide childcare, kennels, lounges and refreshments,
while tall office buildings overhead made the multi-purpose complexes
even more profitable. The introduction of sound in 1926 ended the
variety of entertainment in favour of longer ‘feature films’. (New
York’s Radio City Music Hall of 1932 was the exception.) Within a year
the country had more than 17,000 movie theatres, often the most
opulent and exciting buildings in town. As the Los Angeles architect
1 0 8
Joseph Urban, New
School for Social
Research, New York
City, 1929–31, street
façade.
Winold Reiss, Club
Gallant, New York
City, 1919, side 
elevation.
S. Charles Lee explained, ‘The show starts on the sidewalk.’54
Thousands of these lavish downtown palaces would close soon after
the Depression hit in 1929, victims of financial pressures and a cultur-
al turn against excess. An entirely new type now appeared, the neigh-
bourhood theatre, a diminutive structure with 500–800 seats, unified
from marquee to interiors with smooth industrial materials like steel,
glass, concrete, chrome and Formica. An important early example of
this shift had opened in 1929, as if on cue: the Film Guild Cinema in
New York’s Greenwich Village. Frederick Kiesler, yet another Viennese
émigré, considered cinema an art form that required silence and dark-
ness to help audiences concentrate on the flat screen. His screen-o-
scope, shaped like the human eye or a camera lens, included auxiliary
screens (on the sides and ceiling) to become a total, interactive realm.
In Kiesler’s view, ‘The entire building is a plastic medium dedicated to
the Art of Light ’– what he and Buckminster Fuller called ‘correalism’,
an integral relationship between each object and its environment.55
The architects Ben Schlanger and John Eberson used a similar aesthet-
ic for new movie theatres in the mid-1930s, eliminating the vestigial
stage, the magnificent stairways, balconies and box seats. Schlanger
also emphasized the individual experience of cinema and his opposi-
tion to class and ethnic divisions, a mood captured in the films of
Charlie Chaplin.
Few American architects of the 1920s were as daring as Kiesler, who
recognized theatricality as a means for unpredictable interaction, yet
many engaged similar themes. Modernity was an intoxicating excite-
ment based on ‘mutability of environment’, wrote Janet Flanner in The
Cubical City (1926).56 Despite its limitations, the private market exper-
imented in many realms from skyscrapers and stores to housing, while
non-profit institutions built model schools, hospitals and housing.
Illusions of freedom and progress collapsed in disarray with the
1 0 9 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
Frederick Kiesler,
Film Guild Cinema,
New York City, 1929,
street façade.
Film Guild Cinema,
screening room.
Depression. Real change would come in 1932 – not with the moma
show, but with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election as President. fdr
promised a major federal investment in principles of equality and
social justice, an ambitious goal often sustained by modern architec-
ture. He chose the name for his campaign from a book, A New Deal
(1932) by Stuart Chase, an economist in the rpaa, reminding us that
seemingly minor or idealistic efforts to rethink the environment can
have profound effects.
1 1 1 E l e c t r i c M o d e r n i t i e s , 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 2
US Housing Authority
poster for Lakeview
Terrace, a PWA-
sponsored housing
project by Weinberg,
Conrad & Teare,
Cleveland, Ohio, 1934. 
Franklin Roosevelt’s three-term presidency sustained the us through the
‘long decade’ of the Great Depression and World War Two by ‘politiciz-
ing the whole of American life’.1 The term liberal replaced progressive to
characterize such interventions, determined in purpose, pragmatic in
strategy, what fdr’s first inaugural address called direct action to achieve
dramatic results. The attorney Thurman Arnold first used the term ‘wel-
fare state’ in 1937 to describe a fusing of ‘spiritual government’ and
‘temporal government’ dependent on cultural as well as political fac-
tors.2 Modern architecture, so critical to the New Deal’s goals, would be
altered by its processes. Approximately 90per cent of the country’s
architects and engineers were unemployed in the early 1930s, so even
those few who never worked under governmental auspices were affect-
ed by the momentous changes.
Three issues of relational aesthetics from this era still affect American
architecture. First is the ambiguous tension between centralized power
and decentralization. Regionalist sympathies might derive from bull-
headed backwardness, ‘earmarked’ Congressional funding or
imaginative local knowledge. Second is an implied correlation between
formal and political idioms – typically that Modernism is inherently
progressive while neo-traditionalism or neo-classicism is intrinsically
fascist, though sometimes the inverse – when in fact all governments
employ a range of stylistic idioms.3 Third is the rhetorical excess of
polemics, starting off as conspicuous hyperbole, but soon taken as self-
evident truths. For example, one critic disparaged the Public Works
Administration (pwa), a federal agency, for having set back modern
American architecture by not producing any masterpieces.4 But is archi-
tecture a matter of exceptions or spectrums? And just how did thousands
of pwa projects preclude innovation? 
Established meanings in the arts came under challenge from every
direction. The Popular Front called for intrepid graphic imagery that
could rally the masses, while Ezra Pound demanded ‘Make It New!’ in
1934.5 An experimental tone infused alternative magazines like Plus:
c h a p t e r f o u r
Architecture, the Public and the
State, 1933–1945
Orientations of Contemporary Architecture, sponsored by Architectural
Forum, and Task, by students from several Boston-area architecture
schools. Others switched their titles and timbre. Buckminster Fuller
transformed Philadelphia’s T-Square Club Journal into Shelter in 1932.
The motto inveighed ‘Don’t Fight Forces; Use Them’, focusing on social
and ecological issues and occasionally showing a savage wit. The staid
Pencil Points became Progressive Architecture a decade later. Despite the
crises, the tone was surprisingly optimistic in all the journals. Joseph
Hudnut, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, declared that
‘Form is an expression of faith’ in a 1938 article entitled ‘Architecture
Discovers the Present’.6
Art museums new and old sponsored exhibitions on contemporary
design, their first ventures into this realm. Rarely doctrinaire, they
encouraged discussion about forms, larger environments and their
implications. By 1936 the new architecture curator at moma was vowing
to ‘interrupt abstract arguments’ and replace them with ‘concrete
examples of new construction which may be of vast significance in the
future’.7 An informal San Francisco group called Telesis, asked to mount
an exhibition at the Museum of Art in 1940, supplemented familiar
drawings of the generic urban environment ‘as it is’ and ‘as it could be’
with open-ended questions for the public: ‘What is good housing?’ ‘Do
you like where you work?’ ‘Is this the best we can do?’8
The extensive deliberations rarely cited Johnson’s and Hitchcock’s
supposedly canonical exhibition. (Shelter ridiculed it relentlessly, and
Architectural Forum declared that if the ‘International Style’ was not
broad enough to include the diversity of recent American work, ‘this is
the fault of the term, not of the reality’.)9 It was Catherine Bauer’s
Modern Housing (1934) that taught Americans about progressive archi-
tecture in Europe, which she described as ‘new form [and] joyous,
extravagant creative élan’. A young and outspoken reformer, Bauer
rejected simple solutions and formal typologies. Her constructive crit-
icism noted the weaknesses as well as the strengths of iconic European
Siedlungen, the new modern housing estates. Cautioning Americans
not to emulate work from abroad, she called for Modernisms in the
plural, responsive to change, contingency and cultural diversity. Why
not combine ‘rational investigation’ with the ‘broad history of mass
emotion and popular desires’? Bauer would be a formidable presence
for three decades, challenging architects, museums and government
agencies to experiment and then appraise the results, not just the
intentions. Having helped draft the legislation that created public
housing, she would lambaste the effects of ‘towers-in-the-park’ twenty
years later.10
1 1 4
New Deal programmes embraced American history, including nat-
ural history, as ‘a useable past’ of wholes and parts, a resource for
Modernism, not an opposition. Lewis Mumford’s insightful study The
South in Architecture (1941) stressed the need to respect ‘the integrity’
of regional elements based on local geographical and cultural condi-
tions while always reaching for ‘the universal element [that]
transcends the local, the limited, the partial’.11 The Historic American
Building Survey (habs) paid unemployed architects for measured
drawings; the Historic Sites Act then provided funds to purchase,
maintain and interpret some of these properties. The selection por-
trayed a diverse nation with multiple ethnic and regional vernaculars.
New buildings did not have to emulate ‘historic shrines’. The private
sector followed a similar path. When the architect Mary Colter built
dramatic sites for tourists crafted from stone rubble near the Grand
Canyon (1922–37), she insisted that her structures were ‘geological’, not
replicas or reproductions, even though they drew on Native American
ruins. ‘National Park Service rustic’ all too soon replicated this direct
aesthetic.12
The 1930s witnessed a convergence of social and ecological disasters
that converted environmentalism, formerly an elite pursuit, into a col-
lective necessity. The problems encompassed every kind of setting.
Homeless city-dwellers erected Hooverville shantytowns; abusive farm-
ing and mining practices compounded the devastating effects of floods,
droughts and erosion in the Midwestern Dust Bowl; developers’ crude
layouts had destroyed the promise of many suburbs. The idea of conser-
vation in all these realms focused on large-scale environmental
strategies. Indeed, the modern unit of design combined the region and
the planned community, interconnected with larger infrastructural net-
works. Landscape architects now took a major role in design, notably
Garrett Eckbo, Daniel Kiley and Albert Mayer, all self-described mod-
ernists. They emphasized ‘multiple-use planning’ that accepted flexibility
and mobility, showing how every milieu relates to fluctuating social and
environmental systems.13
The artist Wolfgang Born praised ‘Geo-Architecture’ as ‘America’s
Contribution to the Art of the Future’, a fusion of built forms with dra-
matic natural sites to highlight the power and fragility of the physical
world.14 Architects around the country experimented with permeable
skins and exoskeletons that could be adapted in response to site and
climatic changes. James Marston Fitch’s American Building (1947) praised
these ‘environmental controls’.15 Given the tumult of the era, the search
for equilibrium connected environmental factors with a desire for polit-
ical and social harmony.
1 1 5 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
The New Deal remains controversial in American political culture.
Conservatives, aghast at radical interventions in a free-market economy,
have recently tried to dismantle its welfare-state programmes like Social
Security, disaster relief and housing assistance. Liberal Americans, once
impatient with Roosevelt’s ‘middle way’, are now fighting to preserve that
legacy. The first hundred days of F.D.R.’s administration passed major leg-
islation and created agencies like the pwa, the Civilian Conservation Corps
(ccc) and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (fera). The prin-
cipal goal was reducing unemployment, which hovered around 30 per cent
in large cities. ‘The pwa is essentially a creative agency,’ declared one pam-
phlet; ‘it creates jobs, and it builds’.16 Build it did: overa six-year lifespan
approximately 34,000 buildings, including schools, courthouses, hospitals,
recreational facilities, airports and housing. Major names like William
Lescaze, George Elmslie, Richard Neutra and Lloyd Wright joined the
ranks, though most designers were lesser-known figures who favoured
‘pwa Moderne’. Given Washington politics, all but two of the nation’s more
than 3,000 counties requested and received some new structure. Life mag-
azine declared this the greatest public building programme in the history
of humankind, even though costs ran to $4 billion.17
Work and Public Works
New Deal agencies provided the nation with public services that are
now too easily taken for granted. Three design tenets characterized
the best work, all of them resonant in contemporary Modernism: skil-
ful site planning, public access to virtually all projects and daring
interventions that also engaged local cultures. Collaboration defined
these endeavours, often to the point of anonymity within the ‘alpha-
bet agencies’. Architects worked closely
with engineers and landscape designers
to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure,
creating bold municipal incinerators,
asphalt plants, water-treatment facilities
and majestic parkways. Ancillary link-
ages for the highway networks included
access ramps, toll booths, parking garages
and bus terminals. Almost 20,000 bridges
were constructed throughout the coun-
try, including the much-loved Golden
Gate Bridge (1933–7) in San Francisco,
designed by Irving and Gertrude
Morrow.18
Samuel Wiener
(Jones, Roessle,
Olschner & Wiener)
for the PWA, 
Municipal Incinerator,
Shreveport,
Louisiana, 1935.
1 1 6
The pwa helped fund Robert Moses’s vast system of 3 bridges, 9 park-
ways and 255 parks or recreational facilities throughout the New York
Metropolitan Region. Here, too, results could be at once spartan and
spectacular, for both individual structures and for the ambitious scale of
the ensemble. When Aymar Embury ii, Moses’s favourite architect,
completed the George Washington Bridge in 1931, he left the structure
Ely Jacques Kahn 
and Robert Jacobs,
Municipal Asphalt
Plant, New York City,
1944 (now Asphalt
Green Sports and 
Arts Center). 
Aymar Embury, Dwight
James Baum, and J.
Weisberg for Robert
Moses, New York City
Commissioner of
Parks and the PWA,
McCarren Pool entry
pavilion, Brooklyn,
1936 (now the Joseph
H. Lyons Pool).
1 1 7 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
exposed, discarding the neo-classical sheathing. Le Corbusier would
declare this ‘place of radiant grace’ his favourite building in the us, evi-
dence of the nation’s ‘conviction and enthusiasm’ for the new.19 Moses
too remains a subject of passionate debate. Admirers point to accom-
plishments that transformed New York, benefitting many middle-class
citizens, and broke through bureaucratic roadblocks that usually stymie
ambitious master plans. Critics cannot forget that Moses wielded politi-
cal power like an omnipotent pharaoh, never elected to office and
contemptuous of public opinion. Moses used his authority to demolish
working-class neighbourhoods that stood in his way and further segre-
gate African-Americans, who did not fit into his grandiose vision.20 His
example forces architects, developers and citizens everywhere to ask if the
virtuous goals of Modernism justify the means by which it is realized.
Other government agencies also employed architecture and the arts.
The Works Progress Administration (wpa) took the lead with 188,000
new and renovated public buildings and infrastructure services. Its
Federal Art Project engaged all types of media. Writers were paid to tour
their states and produce travel guides; musicians and actors to entertain
every social group; graphic designers to produce posters; painters and
sculptors to embellish public spaces. Although the goal of ‘art for the
millions’ favoured easily comprehensible documentaries, social realism
and stripped-down classicism, the post-war caricature of insipid repre-
1 1 8
87 Robert Moses’s
New York, showing
the Henry Hudson
Parkway (1933–7)
(foreground) and the
Cross-Bronx
Expressway leading
to the George
Washington Bridge
(1927–31), rendering,
1955.
sentational art is exaggerated. Many administrators were cautious about
any Modernism that seemed coded or self-consciously difficult. Yet
modern architects designed important buildings, and major abstraction-
ists like Stuart Davis painted striking murals. The subtle distortions of
‘dynamic realism’, ‘social surrealism’ and recycled materials (a favourite
for wpa theatres) critiqued entrenched power and artistic fashions.21
The Tennessee Valley Authority (tva) received considerable nation-
al and international praise. Extending across a 1,500-kilometre-long
swath of land and waterways, the tva provided residents of seven
impoverished Appalachian states with an integrated system of electrical
power, flood control, communication, conservation, employment and
recreation. Director Arthur Morgan wanted an ‘architecture of public
relations’ to fulfill his vision of a ‘laboratory in social and economic
life’.22 He appointed the young Hungarian émigré Roland Wank as
principal designer after hearing him criticize the Army Corps of
Engineers’ designs for folksy buildings and ornamented dams. Wank
called for prefabricated housing and forthright volumes as more in
keeping with the spectacular natural settings. An exhibition of 1941 at
moma featured Wank’s seven majestic hydroelectric dams, eleven 
Roland Wank for 
the TVA, powerhouse
and gantry crane,
Kentucky Dam,
1939–44.
1 1 9 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
tributary dams, powerhouses and
gantry cranes. Three years later another
moma exhibition asserted that the tva’s
structures ‘combine[d] to form one of
the monuments of our civilization’.23
The project was orchestrated from
each detail to the totality, ‘one unified
machine, one organic whole’, in the
words of the tva economist Stuart
Chase.24 Every aspect was geared to
impress the press and the public. Each
dam incorporated adjacent sites for
recreation. A sequence of views along
new roadways built expectations, and
the striking visitor centres orchestrated
enticing spectacles. Careful site planning softened the monotony of pre-
fabricated trailers and standardized permanent dwellings in the new
town of Norris, Tennessee. Nonetheless, the ‘socialist’ premises of pub-
lic ownership curtailed the ambitious goal of the tva as a prototype for
cooperative ecological settlements elsewhere. Nor were all the locals so
content. Lewis Hine, hired to document the dramatic changes to a ‘back-
ward’ way of life, observed that most people resented ‘the rapid and, to
some, shocking transition to a new era’.25 Norris would later be criticized
as a suburb in the wilderness.
Industrial designers conjured up products at all scales, including
buildings at world’s fairs that drew consumers by recasting technological
fantasies as voluptuous modern power. The role of the media continued
to expand as radio stations multiplied with the popularity of fdr’s
‘Fireside Chats’. Crowds in Los Angeles flocked to two rival networks on
Sunset Boulevard: William Lescaze’s sleek ‘International’ broadcast sta-
tion for cbs and the Austin Company’s glass-brick Moderne building for
nbc. Film production concentrated in Hollywood, where studios built
new headquarters, but the real excitement occurred on the back lots. A
major studio now produced some 40 films a year with extravagant sets
typically designed by young architects with a penchant for cosmopolitan
modern decor, high-tech imagery and lavish fantasy settings. The art
director Stephen Goosson combined the urban visions of Le Corbusier
and Hugh Ferriss for Just Imagine (1930). His utopian Shangri-La for Lost
Horizon (1937) mixed Europe’s cubic volumes with an elegant horizontal-
ity and landscaping reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright’sown Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine,
Wisconsin (1936–9), embodied the New Deal’s call for enlightened work
Prefabricated trailers
near Fontana Dam,
Tennessee, c. 1939.
1 2 0
relations. The commission conveyed a sense of redemption: a sudden
economic surge for a company that had refused to fire employees; a last-
minute shift by chief executives who had first commissioned a prosaic
design; proof of the phoenix-like revival of Wright’s career. The daring
structural system used mushroom-columns made of concrete rein-
forced with steel mesh, expanding at the top like lily pads some 6 metres
in diameter, then tapering down to delicate bases set in hinged 23-centi-
metre metal supports that Wright called ‘crow’s feet’. The Wisconsin
Industrial Commission was highly suspicious and demanded proof that
this system could carry the weight of the roof. Wright complied, ever the
virtuoso performer, loading the test column with 60 tons of sandbags
and rocks, five times the required weight, to the delight of reporters who
covered the event.
Equally inspired was the use of standard Pyrex-glass tubing to fill the
interstices between the lily pads and within the red-brick walls. The
workspace is suffused with natural light during the day; the exterior is
luminous at night. As in the Larkin Building, mezzanines looked out
over the main workspace as they connected a multi-level assemblage of
offices, laboratories and other facilities. In another prophetic gesture,
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Johnson Wax
Administration
Building, Racine,
Wisconsin, 1936–9,
view of the Great
Hall.
1 2 1 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
the lobby flowed directly into a cave-like garage. When the entire city
was invited to the opening in 1939, over a third of the population came
to marvel at the Great Workroom. Wright considered it as inspiring ‘as
any cathedral’. American Business acclaimed the ‘uplifting repose’, and
Life called the project a harbinger of things to come, more prophetic
than the New York World’s Fair.26
Housing in Hard Times
Now in his sixties, Wright imagined himself reinventing every aspect of
American society. Broadacre City captures the scope of that ambition.
The idea had emerged in the late 1920s, but remained purely rhetorical
until the New York Times asked him for a counter-proposal to Le
Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse in 1932. ‘Ruralism as distinguished from
Urbanisme’, Wright declared, describing an immense harmonized plan
that would, he hoped, encompass the entire nation – or any other coun-
try that might be interested. A 1.1-metre-square model, a prototype
utopia for some 4,000 people, was displayed at Rockefeller Center in
1935 and then travelled to other cities. Broadacre celebrated the auto-
mobile as the vehicle for freedom and a return to the land, ‘minimum of
one acre to the family’.27 Occasional towers and malls provided points of
concentration for commerce, culture and government within the vast
dispersed landscape. Megalomaniac and environmentally unsound,
an artistically coordinated sprawl, Broadacre paradoxically sought to
harness the forces of mass production, automobiles and telecommuni-
cations – a decentralized but synchronized vision of modernity that still
remains potent for many Americans.
It was not this grand project, but an extraordinary country house,
Fallingwater, that ensured Wright’s fame. Edgar Kaufmann, scion of
Pittsburgh’s largest department store, commissioned the family hide-
away at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, late in 1934. He supposedly did so at the
behest of his son, who had just become an apprentice at Taliesin (work-
ing on the Broadacre City model), although the opposite may be true. In
any case, Fallingwater, completed in 1937, soon became the most famous
modern house in the us and probably in the world. A drawing of it
hangs behind Wright on the 1938 cover of Time magazine. A Wrightian
myth suggests that he designed Fallingwater in only two hours, although
he visited the site many times. In any case the design never changed after
the initial proposal, which surpassed all possible expectations even in its
location, straddling and possessing the small waterfall rather than mere-
ly looking out upon it. Like so many of Wright’s designs, the structure
transcends oppositions. It seems at once a natural formation, anchored
1 2 2
to the earth by vertical piers of local sandstone, and a daring tour de
force. Reinforced-concrete slabs cantilever out 4.5 metres from the rock
shelf, then realign with the streambed. Those floating planes make this
relatively small dwelling feel expansive. They suggest that Wright had
studied the European modernists he so disdained, although Fallingwater
is unquestionably site-specific even in its cultural location, at once
enhancing nature and wrestling with it. The experience is magical,
encompassing both the permanence and the impermanence of creativity
and the natural world.28
Wright continued to advocate high-quality affordable housing with a
new moniker, ‘Usonian’, alluding simultaneously to the us, to the tech-
nocratic acronyms of New Deal agencies and to his friend Buckminster
Fuller’s Dymaxion schemes. Like other modern dwelling types,
Usonians maximized economy and reduced area. Wright experimented
with several basic modules, typically a grid of rectangles offset by diag-
onals, but also circles and hexagons. Shallow concrete-slab foundations
contained radiant heating, which also prevented frost heaves in cold cli-
mates. External structure and internal finish became a single layer,
usually brick or wood-frame, left exposed and reinforced with built-in
storage to stiffen single-storey walls. Wright nestled some delightful spa-
tial experience in every dwelling, what he called ‘essential Joy’, perhaps
simply dappled sunlight through geometric fretwork on a thin plane of
inexpensive plywood. Each house balanced ecological and social harmony
with individuality and even hedonistic delight.
The Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, designed for two ‘common
sense’ young professionals, was the archetypal Usonian (1936–7). Its
inclusive modernity maximized economy and flexibility without sacrific-
ing familiarity or comfort. ‘What are the essentials in their case, a typical
case?’ Wright asked readers of Architectural Forum.29 He then specified
three experience-based criteria for the modern dwelling: a transparent
wall of glass to connect the living area with a small enclosed garden; a
compact ‘work-space’ (aka kitchen) to form a service core, replacing the
hearth as a spatial fulcrum; and a carport to shelter the automobile, now
fully integrated into the family dwelling. All three would become norms
for the best post-World War Two suburban houses.
Wright’s houses remind us that residential building continued
despite the Depression. Indeed, government subsidies focused over-
whelmingly on the private sector, seeking to revive and modernize this
critical segment of the economy. The Federal Housing Administration
(fha), created in 1934, guaranteed mortgage loans for banks and
improved the terms for owners. As hoped, housing starts quickly rose
for the first time in eight years. The fha soon financed almost half the
1 2 3 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Herbert Jacobs
House, Madison,
Wisconsin, 1936, 
living room.
Jacobs House, 
floor plan. 
country’s mortgages, investing more than $4 billion in the next six years
and prompting most banks to follow its guidelines.30 Both the numbers
and the architecture have usually been ignored. Local fha officials were
often cautious about the re-sale value of ‘non-traditional’ styles or pro-
grammes, but a shift in public taste saw modern houses become
increasingly popular, ‘no longer the frigid white symbol of a small cult’
in the words of Architectural Forum.31 Far more problematic was the
fha’s endorsement of racial segregation as part of sound‘neighbour-
hood planning’ – a position that lasted until 1968.
Modern American dwellings shared an attitude towards domesticity
more than a stylistic idiom. An open flow of space on the ground floor
reinforced informality and the continuities of an ‘indoor–outdoor
house’. Industrialized systems of construction joined with simple, tactile
natural materials, often drawn from the local landscape: wide cedar
and spruce planks in the Pacific North-west, blank stucco walls in the
South-west, rough fieldstone in Pennsylvania, clapboard siding in
New England. The Modern House in America, a popular compendium,
emphasized such regional adaptations, dismissing the International
Style as a misnomer for copyists. One of the editors, Katherine Morrow
Ford, insisted that ‘modern architecture cannot be reduced to a precise
formula.’32 Hybridity rather than purity seemed the fitting expression of
American culture, unpredictable amalgams of tradition and innovation,
local and universal, personal and collective.
Walter Gropius had been intrigued by the idea of ‘light construction,
full of bright daylight’ since his early days at the Bauhaus in Germany.
Walter Gropius with
Marcel Breuer,
Gropius House,
Lincoln,
Massachusetts, 1937,
garden façade.
1 2 5 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
After the Nazis seized power, he emigrated to England and then, in 1937,
to the us, where he was invited to chair the Architecture Department at
Harvard. The next year he designed his own house in suburban Lincoln,
Massachusetts, partnering with the Hungarian Marcel Breuer for this
and several other residences. If the Bauhaus remains present in the white
planes, transparent glass walls and flat roof, which caused squawks from
neighbours, the two colleagues eagerly incorporated local clapboard and
fieldstone,as well as that all-American vernacular element, the screened
porch. ‘There is no such thing as an “International Style”,’ Gropius insisted.
‘The fusion . . . produced a house that I would never have built in Europe
with its entirely different climatic, technical and psychological back-
ground.’33 Gropius asserted a more stringent philosophy in his teaching.
Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson on ‘Self-Reliance’, he urged students
to break with architectural history in order to become leaders for the
future. Since Modernism was by now accepted, even triumphant, in
most American schools by the late 1930s, the Gropius crusade fostered
Harwell Hamilton
Harris, Havens House,
Berkeley, California,
1939, photograph by
Man Ray.
1 2 6
missionary zeal rather than the ‘humanistic’ or ‘democratic’ aspirations
for ‘diversity’ of his writings.
American Modernism remained strongly regional throughout the
1930s. California continued to foster exceptional creativity. Neutra and
Schindler in Los Angeles were joined by a second generation that
included Gregory Ain, Raphael Soriano and J. R. Davison. Cliff May
reinterpreted local history with the vaguely modern, low-lying ranch
house, while Albert Frey cultivated cosmopolitan flash at the desert
resort of Palm Springs. Cohorts in the Bay Area interpreted their
region’s informal, nature-infused ‘simple life’ with redwood siding,
abundant glass and dramatic angles. The San Francisco Museum of Art
held special exhibitions in 1942 and 1949 to promote ‘Bay Area
Domestic Architecture’ by William Wurster, Harwell Hamilton Harris,
Gardner Dailey, John Funk and others. Less well known outside their
locales are Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon in the Pacific North-west;
Kraetsch & Kraetsch and Alden Dow in the upper Midwest; Harris
Armstrong in Missouri; Victorine and Samuel Homsey in Delaware;
and Igor Polivitsky, Robert Law Weed and Lawrence Murray Dixon 
in Florida.
Climatic adaptations determined Weed’s Florida Tropical Home in
Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress exhibition. The house’s solar orien-
tation, cross-ventilation and concrete canopies (‘eyebrows’) to shade
windows remained mainstays of modern houses in that state until the
mid-1950s. George Fred Keck’s path was more indirect. He realized that
the glass walls of his House of Tomorrow at the 1933 Chicago exhibition
kept the workmen comfortable despite the bitter Midwestern winter.
Keck and his brother William immediately began to experiment with
passive solar orientation and flexible louvres in houses and apartment
buildings, keenly aware of aesthetic as well as physical effects. When
local developer Howard Sloan commissioned a home just outside
Chicago in 1940, the Kecks enlisted producers to meet their specifica-
tions for radiant floor heating, ventilation louvres, insulation materials
and Thermopane windows. Two years later Sloan renamed his develop-
ment Solar Park and required that all new architecture be ‘modern’ –
that is, architect-designed with climatic adaptations.
Fortune magazine now defined American modern housing as ‘inventive,
industrially produced, and resourceful’ about environments.34 The editors
clearly saw a business potential that has returned in recent years. The
appearance and purpose of windows changed when the Libbey-Owens-
Ford Glass Company launched ‘The Picture Window Idea’ in the early
1930s, emphasizing large, unobstructed expanses of glass to frame views of
the outdoors.35 The popular shelter press hailed this ‘Modern Miracle’, and
1 2 7 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
architects experimented with solar orientation. Two of the most significant
were finished just after the war. Eleanor Raymond and Dr Maria Telkes,
director of mit’s solar laboratory, collaborated on a Solar House with early
photovoltaic panels (1948). That same year, Frank Lloyd Wright finished
another home for the Jacobs family in Middleton, Wisconsin, named the
Solar Hemicycle for its arc of windows facing a sun-catching sunken basin.
The earth for the basin became a protective berm that blocked north winds
in the winter. Ingenuity balanced wizardry.
The Depression gave considerable impetus to prefabrication – a
catchword for an array of processes and products. Innovative research
was often affiliated with universities and government agencies such as
the Forest Products Laboratory. By 1935, 33 private companies had gen-
erated unique systems based on stressed-skin plywood, modular steel
Richard Neutra, VDL
Research House, Los
Angeles, 1932, in
Libbey-Owens-Ford
advertisement from
Home and Garden
(May 1934). 
Keck & Keck, 
Keck Gottschalk Keck
Apartment, Chicago,
1937, dining room of
Fred Keck apartment.
1 2 9 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
frames or steel frames with asbestos-
cement panels. Two architects founded
major firms: Howard Fisher’s General
Houses and Robert McLaughlin’s
American Houses, known for its steel-
frame Moto-Home, purportedly easy to
expand or move and equipped with a
‘mechanical core’. Marketing for modern
houses routinely evoked the automobile
industry, which continued to expand
without major advances.
Collaboration was an ideal if not a real-
ity. Robert Davison linked the Pierce
Foundation with Columbia University’s
Institute for Housing Research. He hired sociologists to analyse changing
patterns in consumerism and family life at Pierce Heights near
Hightstown, New Jersey, and building-materials companies to help devel-
op products like Cemesto (thin sandwich panels with layered
asbestos-and-fibre insulation), soon a standard material. Buckminster
Fuller’s second Dymaxion dwelling was one of several mast-houses during
the 1930s. Many architects were drawn to ‘shape engineering’ (a term
derived from the curve of an aircraft fuselage), such as Corwin Willson’s
Eggshell trailer-house, Martin Wagner’s Iron Igloo and Wallace Neff ’s
Bubble House, produced by spraying concrete over inflated rubber bal-
loons. None of these went beyond a few prototypes since inventive forms
trumped issues of production. Konrad Wachsman and Walter Gropiusset
out to make a ‘packaged house’ for the General Panel Corporation, but
Wachsman kept redesigning the purpose-made components, aiming for an
ideal system, so that after four years not one house had been completed.
Wherever possible, modern dwellings were organized into enclaves
with careful attention to landscaping. The most powerful examples were
the New Deal’s three Greenbelt Towns, begun in 1935 as self-sufficient sub-
urban towns surrounded by 0.8-kilometre-wide protective greenswards in
the tradition of English Garden Cities and Radburn. Greenbelt, outside
Washington, was the most ambitiously modern in its clusters of attached
housing and communal outdoor areas. It provided an important model
for New Towns in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Miami and Miami Beach filled with blocks of simple Art Deco gar-
den apartments, carefully sited for sun-control and cross-ventilation.
Privately owned low-rise garden apartments in Los Angeles included
Neutra’s Strathmore and Landfair, as well as Gregory Ain’s Dunsmuir
Flats in Los Angeles (1937), admired for the varied façades that adapt to
Robert McLaughlin
for American Houses,
Inc., Moto-Home, New
London, Connecticut,
1933–4. 
1 3 0
the site. Smooth horizontal planes faced one street, garages another,
while step-backed façades opened onto small private gardens, providing
abundant light on three sides of each unit. Even mass-market builders
like Fritz Burns of southern California emphasized the need to think of
streetscapes and ‘architectural sequencing’.
Housing the ‘Common Man’
The New Deal also saw the first federal efforts to address the injustice of
‘one-third of a nation, ill-housed’, in the words of fdr’s second inaugu-
ral address in 1936. The total numbers are small: just over 21,000 units in
51 projects under the pwa; 2,200 in the three suburban greenbelt towns;
Gregory Ain,
Dunsmuir Flats 
garden apartments,
Los Angeles, 1937,
garden façade.
1 3 1 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
and another 120,000 units under the Housing Authority (usha) before
World War Two – many fewer than planned and meagre in comparison
with some 4.5 million new units in Europe.36 American housing usually
incorporated familiar tropes from local surroundings, in part to deflect
public suspicion about such interventions. Pressure from realtors and
reformers required slum clearance, demolishing at least one existing
unit for every new one. Few of the evicted families could afford the new
government housing, which was geared to the ‘middle third’, the out-of-
luck ‘deserving poor’. With this combination of reforms the nation’s
poor often saw their housing options plummet.
All the same, the architectural quality and site plans of the best pwa
housing remain inspiring. A commitment to jobs brought high-quality
craftsmanship in a range of materials. Realizing that ‘Housing Is More
than Houses’, Washington added facilities for leisure, recreation and
social services. Designers engaged the landscape, drawing on trends in
Swiss and Scandinavian housing, as well as Ernst May’s work in
Frankfurt, Germany. The site plans accentuated four qualities: irregular
super-blocks with low-rise, low-coverage building groups; continuity
with surrounding streets and buildings; adaptation to the distinctive
contours of the landscape; and inviting spaces between buildings.
Educators debated the relationship between the rigorous minimalist aes-
thetic of Europe’s Modern Movement and a more ‘humanized’ informal
variety in the us. Harvard Dean Joseph Hudnut, responsible for bring-
ing Gropius to the design school, now implicitly criticized him when
Hudnut derided ‘plumbing, fresh air and prophylactic calm’ as sanitized
ideals imposed on working-class families. In the ultimate insult, he called
Gropius’ approach to Modernism more suburban than urban.37
The Carl Mackley Houses in north-eastern Philadelphia remain
appealing more than 70 years later. Adaptation to circumstances charac-
terized the project from the start. Catherine Bauer represented the
client, a local branch of the hosiery-makers’ union. The principal archi-
tect, Oskar Stonorov, a recent émigré from Germany, presented one
version of the project for the Philadelphia venue of moma’s Modern
Architecture exhibition in 1932. In keeping with recent avant-garde
trends, this model featured ten-storey Zeilenbau rows – rigid diagonal
slabs orientated to maximize sunlight and fresh air. Stonorov knew
enough not to show this version to union officials. His partner, Alfred
Kastner, oversaw the massing and site layout, converting the unrelenting
shapes to irregular three-storey blocks. The buildings rise and fall with
the gently sloping site, punctuated by passageways, balconies and small
recessed spaces around stair landings. Even colour softened as
Stonorov’s original white walls gave way to industrial tiles in autumnal
1 3 2
Oskar Stonorov and
Albert Kastner for
the PWA, Mackley
Houses, Philadelphia,
1932–5, axonometric
drawing from
Architectural Record
(February 1934). 
Mackley Houses,
photographed in 1985. 
shades of orange, tan and mauve, consistent with the multi-hued brick
of Philadelphia’s row-house vernacular. The unit sizes were meagre, but
generous public amenities included childcare facilities, a swimming
pool, meeting rooms, an underground garage and rooftop laundries.38
New York experimented in multiple veins. Frederick Ackerman’s First
Houses alternated rehabilitation and demolition along one dilapidated
block of East Village tenements. The Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn
(originally the Ten Eyck) comprised the largest and most costly pwa
project. William Lescaze, chief designer under R. R. Shreve, organized
the ten-block site into three super-blocks with Zeilenbau slabs set 15
degrees off the grid. Bravado overruled climate studies, since the court-
yards become wind channels in winter and block summer breezes.
Nonetheless, the bold horizontal stripes and handsome community
services cultivated a sense of local pride. Harlem River Houses responded
directly to local residents’ demands, articulated by the Consolidated
Tenants League. Designed by Archibald Manning Brown with John
Louis Wilson, an African-American architect, the series of walkways and
courtyards connects the project with the surrounding streets.39 Another
African-American architect, Hilyard Robinson, enlivened flat-roofed
International Style buildings at Langston Terrace (1938) in Washington,
dc, with bas-relief ornament and informal placement around a central
courtyard on a naturally terraced slope.
‘New groups and classes are knocking at the door,’ explained a 1936
article in the Record, ‘asking as of right what used to be the privileges of
the few.’40 Good intentions to be sure, but when American public hous-
ing became official in 1937 with the Wagner-Steagall Act standards
plummeted. usha set policy and funding in Washington while local
authorities chose locations and interpreted the guidelines. Unlike the
Burton Cairns and
Vernon DeMars for
the FSA, migrant 
workers’ housing at
Chandler, Arizona,
1936. 
1 3 4
pwa most projects were not so much restrained as resentful, even mean-
spirited. This was not the fault of ‘Modernism’, but of specific repressive
policies. Congressional pressure imposed draconian restrictions on con-
struction costs and standards to make it clear that public housing was
inferior to the lowest-quality private housing.41
The Farm Security Administration (fsa) was the most radical and
unequivocally modern federal housing agency. The fsa built 95 commu-
nities for migrant farm workers from California to Texas. The justly
famous photographs of the migrants by Dorothea Lange and others
dramatized the poignant dignity of these impoverished families that fled
the Midwestern Dust Bowl. The architecture, while far less well known,
parlayed similar emotions into redressing some of the problems.
California’s regional office insisted on considerable autonomy for itsprincipal designers, Burton Cairns and Vernon DeMars, who mixed
sources from European housing estates and Israeli kibbutzim with
American garden-apartments and local vernacular traditions.42
Inexpensive materials predominated by necessity and predilection: ply-
wood, asbestos cement, prefabricated aluminium panels and traditional
adobe bricks.
fsa layouts varied as well, using Zeilenbau rows, hexagons, culs-
de-sac and differing combinations from neighbourhood to neighbour-
hood. Interviews generated multi-bedroom units for extended families
at the end of large rows and designated spaces for baseball, weekend
dances and teenagers’ drag races. The landscape architect Garrett Eckbo
placed schools, childcare, health centres and other community build-
ings near existing groves of trees. Cross-ventilation, walls of windows
and covered walkways provided further relief from oppressive heat.
The architectural media were resoundingly enthusiastic, as was the
Swiss critic Albert Roth, who included the fsa camp at Chandler,
Arizona, in Modern Architecture (1940), the quintessential text for
European modernists. Two decades later, Architectural Record declared
that these fsa images were part of ‘the collective subconscious of the
Modern Movement’.43
Public Spaces of ‘Better Living’
Some private businesses prospered as ad men of the mid-1930s invented
two still-potent phrases ‘Better Living’ and ‘American Way of Life’.
Southern cities began to promote their assets, laying foundations for the
Sunbelt’s post-war growth. Los Angeles continued to thrive in myth and
fact, a new breed of modern city, seemingly amorphous in its far-
flung dispersal. Aircraft and automobile factories appeared on the city’s
1 3 5 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
periphery even before the war, along with
planned housing enclaves. Popular tourist
attractions multiplied – drive-ins, motor
inns, the Farmer’s Market, Crossroads of
the World – while cosmopolitan shops
and department stores flourished along
Wilshire and other major boulevards.
Government agencies funded the most
important public buildings of the 1930s,
often combining structures with sites to
bring citizens together for a variety of
activities, planned and spontaneous.
Some were grand, like the Red Rocks
Amphitheater near Denver (1941), with its
excellent natural acoustics for 9,000 peo-
ple at a spectacular site carved from
sandstone monoliths. Most projects were
comparatively small, sheds for classical-
music festivals and infill community
centres in urban neighbourhoods.
Waterfront development on ocean and river sites combined ecological
adaptations with public recreation. City and state parks added swim-
ming pools, field houses, playgrounds and band shells to serve large
crowds. Resort towns like Stowe, Vermont, improved their ski trails at
public expense.
San Antonio’s Paseo del Alamo, or Riverwalk, has its origins here in a
process that illustrates similar ventures elsewhere. Aware that the river in
the centre of town had become an open sewer prone to dangerous
floods, the local architect Robert Hugman had first envisioned a plan in
1929. A decade later, a newly elected Democratic mayor secured gener-
ous federal funding from the wpa. By 1941 the city had a bypass channel
for flood control, 21 blocks of landscaped walkways, 31 stairways to the
river’s edge, 21 handsome bridges, shops and a large amphitheatre across
the river from a stage for plays and films. O’Neill Ford restored the near-
by La Villita, centre of the original Mexican settlement, under the
auspices of the National Youth Administration (nya), which soon
became Lyndon Johnson’s first political base.
The New Deal dramatically increased the number and quality of
American schools and modernized their pedagogies, giving assertive
architectural expression to theories of progressive education. Modern
pre-schools were both rational and lyrical. Neutra’s prototype ring-plan
school from ‘Rush City Reformed’ remained on paper until a school
Arneson River
Theater at Paseo del
Alamo Riverwalk, San
Antonio, Texas,
Robert Hugman for
Works Progress
Administration (WPA),
1929–41, photograph
c. 1960. 
1 3 6
principal in Bell, California, campaigned to see it realized in 1935. Crow
Island School (1940) in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago,
became a nationwide model for decades to come. The design was a col-
laboration between Eliel Saarinen, his son Eero, the Chicago firm of
Perkins, Wheeler and Will, and Carleton Washburne, the school super-
intendent whose influential Winnetka Plan loosened strict separations
Saarinen and
Saarinen with
Perkins, Wheeler 
and Will, Crow Island
School, Winnetka,
Illinois, 1940. 
Crow Island School,
plan. 
1 3 7 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
between grades and between curricular
subjects. ‘Activity classrooms’ encouraged
various pursuits and flowed into age-
grouped outdoor spaces. Simple brickwork
and local wood reinforced the spirit of joy-
ful resourcefulness. John Dewey provided
the philosophical grounding: these schools
were social centres for the entire commu-
nity, their indoor and outdoor facilities
open round the clock.
High schools were more imposing
structures. While some held fast to the
neo-Georgian style, many New Deal
schools combined modern functionalism
with Moderne streamlining. A moma exhi-
bition on schools in 1942 featured
examples that had also appeared, without
the architects’ names, in pwa publications.
Lescaze’s Ansonia High School in
Coldspring, Connecticut (1939), was a res-
olute steel-framed structure articulating
the separation of three units (auditorium,
classrooms and gymnasium), with smooth
bands of glass block and salmon-colored brick to enliven the façade.
Architectural design became more abstract with an early bubble dia-
gram about school activities in William Caudill’s pamphlet ‘Space for
Teaching’ (1941). But rhetoric about straightforward plainness and func-
tional plans sometimes disguised class and racial prejudice. Since the
construction and maintenance of American schools are tied to property
taxes, poor districts suffer calculated cutbacks in architecture and edu-
cational services, while prosperous suburbs enjoy good facilities.
Several independent architecture schools took up the modernist cause
while asserting distinctive philosophical goals. Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Taliesin West in Arizona is at once a formal statement with its diagonal
geometry and an informal ensemble determined by topography and site.
After a three-year search during respites from the harsh Wisconsin win-
ters, Wright found the site in Paradise Valley. Planning evolved in situ
beginning in January 1938. Apprentices made the walls of ‘desert rubble
stone’, mixed with cement and cured in wooden moulds, creating a tex-
tured material that seems primeval. Regular rows of rough-sawn
redwood trusses are angled to echo the mountains in the distance and
support the roof, much of it originally covered in taut canvas. One terrace
‘Space Relation
Diagram’ from William
Caudill’s pamphlet
‘Space for Teaching’
(1941). 
1 3 8
incorporated a petroglyph boulder found nearby, suggesting archaic cre-
ative forces as well as modern innovations. Like Taliesin East in
Wisconsin, this ‘desert compound’ encompassed home, work, school and
community life for the Taliesin Fellowship and their visitors. It would be
a formative place for many creative architects who were apprenticed
there, including John Lautner, Alden Dow, Paolo Soleri, Henry Klumb
and the iconoclastic moma curator Elizabeth Mock.
1 3 9 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Taliesin West,
Scottsdale, Arizona,
1938–59.
Taliesin West, 
interior of studio. 
Mies van der Rohe,
Alumni Memorial Hall,
IIT, 1947, corner detail.
Mies van der Rohe,
Illinois Institute of
Technology (IIT),
1943–7, photo-montage with model
of campus.
Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology (iit) represents
a seemingly opposite but parallel approach to education and environ-
ments. If Wright connected to myth and place, so did Mies with his
timeless classical abstraction. Both shut out the inconsistencies of reality.
This commission brought Mies to the us in 1937, when Chicago’s
Armour Institute, soon renamed iit, hired him to direct its School of
Architecture and create a prestigious new campus. He sketched the rig-
orous site plan of parallel rows the next year, then set it on a plinth and
slightly modulated the uncompromising uniformity during the war
years. Mies’s devotion to Baukunst, a famously untranslatable German
term, elevated customary skills and well-established rules to attain a
spiritual ideal. iit gave substance to his declaration, paraphrasing
Thomas Aquinas, that ‘truth is the significance of facts’.44
Seemingly oblivious to the site, Mies in fact sought to evoke the
‘material and spiritual conditions’ of Chicago’s grid.45 Fascinated by
American building methods, his reiterated materials celebrated com-
monplace stock items. The Minerals and Metals Research Building
(1941–3) established a basic prototype of large-span interiors with low
brick-and-glass curtain walls. The strategically exposed i-beams were in
fact welded to the corner columns, a symbolic expression of structure
that Mies continued to use in later buildings. Despite protests neither
Mies nor the iit trustees worried that construction forced demolition of
the Mecca, an apartment building that had been at the heart of Chicago’s
African-American cultural ‘Renaissance’. This provided another layer of
what Sarah Whiting has called iit’s ‘bas-relief urbanism’, simultaneously
figural and abstract, sitting lightly on the ground yet incised into the city
fabric. In all these ways iit anticipated post-war redevelopment.46
Deploying Modern Architecture
The American economy rebounded in 1939 as the government and
major industries geared up to help the European Allied powers fight the
Nazis. The American ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ doubled the output of air-
craft and munitions factories even before the us officially entered the
combat. The nation declared war in December 1941, the day after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. First 10 million, then 20 million
Americans enlisted. Almost as many joined the war effort at home by
helping produce ships, planes and munitions in 46 different locations.
Flight schools and air stations proliferated. Fighting on two fronts,
across the Atlantic and the Pacific, required a coordinated national
effort, one that would have an extraordinary effect on the post-war
economy and, by extension, on architecture.
1 4 1 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
The scale and coordination of
wartime production altered every
industry from weaponry to building
materials. A hundred major corpora-
tions received two-thirds of government
contracts, names like General Electric,
Chrysler, Boeing, Westinghouse and
Kaiser. Nearly a thousand automotive
plants converted to war work. The mili-
tary commissioned new factories, port
facilities, supply depots and airports,
most of them colossal. The world’s
largest aircraft plant, the Dodge engine
factory in Chicago, designed by Albert
Kahn and constructed by the George
Fuller Company (1943), had an area of
600,000 square metres, almost half as
much floor space as the entire industry in 1940.47 As plants grew expo-
nentially larger, engineers calibrated the fabrication of tanks and
bombers down to the square centimetre of space. The Austin
Company, famous for its industrial buildings, designed and built
‘blackout’ factories with ‘breathable’ walls and luminous surfaces that
could function on minimal electric light.
With several billion dollars allocated to scientific research, universi-
ties and industrial consortiums built sophisticated laboratories to study
radar, rocketry and jet propulsion. New synthetics replaced critical
matériel like steel, aluminium and rubber, leading Newsweek to proclaim
a ‘New Era in Plastics’ in 1943.48 Sponsored-research laboratories at the
Dow and DuPont chemical companies invented fibreglass, styrofoam
foam cores and clear acrylics for pressure-sealed aircraft radomes. New
resins made plywood more durable, while laminated-timber columns
and trusses extended across astounding distances. Navy airship hangars
used prefabricated wooden arches to break previous records for timber
spans. Since wartime culture ‘made do’ with scarce resources, recycled
debris became Homasote, a wallboard of wood pulp and ground news-
paper bound with resin.
The Navy Seabees included more than a thousand architects. (The
word Seabees spells out the acronym for their official name,
Construction Battalions). They designed ingenious systems and unique
structures that made a virtue of necessity by improvising with the mate-
rials at hand. Quonset huts represent a similar team effort, created by a
team of Navy architects in just one month, April 1941, at Quonset Point
‘Housing: An Integral
Part of Total Defense’,
Pencil Points
(February 1941).
1 4 2
Naval Air Station in Rhode Island. Made of lightweight corrugated steel,
Quonsets were stackable, easy to assemble and highly adaptable. More
than 170,000 were produced in over 80 different plans and sizes during
the war, for use as hospitals, hangars, housing and storage units around
the world. Even the earliest schemes featured insulation layers and con-
necting units.
The Quonset hut’s success can be attributed in part to its corporate pro-
ducers. George Fuller, a leading Chicago contractor, initiated the process,
while Stran-Steel was a well-known manufacturer. Buckminster Fuller
invented something remarkably similar in 1941, the Dymaxion
Deployment Unit, a minimal mobile dwelling that went on display at
moma. A few hundred were produced before restrictions on sheet steel
were imposed. Quonsets were even more versatile, however, especially in
the hands of imaginative designers. Bruce Goff joined the Seabees and used
them extensively, most famously to renovate and build new structures at
Camp Parks, a Seabee base near San Francisco, in 1944. The Seabee Chapel
combined two ‘elephant huts’ with masonry walls and surplus or scavenged
Austin Company, 
climate-controlled
Consolidated-Vulvee
Aircraft ‘Blackout’
Plant, Fort Worth,
Texas, 1942, partial
view of interior.
1 4 3 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
materials.49 ‘Any materials were fair, old or new,’ he explained; ‘we had to
reevaluate them to use them in ways that seem fresh and valid’.50
Some 9 million people moved to the booming coastal cities and new
war-towns to help the war effort. Desperate to meet the housing needs
of defence workers, Washington passed the Lanham Act giving lucrative
subsidies to private developers. The leaders formed a lobby, the National
Association of Home Builders (nahb), and restructured their mode of
operations. By 1942 the private sector had built nearly a million
dwellings, 80 per cent of the wartime total. Mass production and prefab-
rication facilitated fast-track schedules for barracks, trailers,
demountable units and permanent housing. (The nahb insisted this
housing had to be taken off the market, either demolished or sold after
the war ended.) Gunnison’s conveyor belts led to the firm’s slogan ‘Press
a Button, and You Get a Home’. Henry Kaiser’s Aluminum Company
used factory-based systems to create plants and housing for 45,000 ship-
yard workers and their families, including the ‘miracle city’ of Vanport,
Oregon, soon known as Kaiserville. William Levitt adopted labour-
saving on-site techniques from southern California developers to
build 750 naval officers’ homes at Oakdale Farms in Norfolk, Virginia,
which became the prototype for Levittown in 1947, the low-cost,
mass-produced housing project thatepitomized post-war suburbia.51
A third of these defence workers were women – known generically as
Rosie the Riveter – which raised questions about the relations between
home and work, especially since three-quarters of them were married.
Bruce Goff, Seabee
Chapel, Camp Parks,
California, 1945. 
1 4 4
Although women with young children were encouraged to stay at home,
Kaiser provided 24-hour daycare services staffed by experts, and 3,000
such centres were constructed around the country.52 Pietro Belluschi’s
McLoughlin Heights in Washington state put daycare in an arcaded
shopping centre around a pedestrian green, an amenity lauded in the
press as a new kind of community centre. But most defence towns
adopted fha standards for ‘planned communities’ with limited social
services. As large numbers of African-Americans migrated from the
South seeking factory work, racial segregation became more entrenched,
and ‘incursions’ led to riots in several cities. When American local gov-
ernments looked ahead to a new phase of growth, most of them took
these self-contained, segregated satellite communities as the prototype
for post-war suburbia and urban redevelopment.
Once again, some notable alternatives merit close attention. Herbert
Whittemore, director of the Division of Defense Housing, hired a num-
ber of prominent modern architects. Indeed, he specifically called for
‘Unusual materials, designs, and methods of fabrication not used in
normal times’.53 A small British pamphlet, ‘Homes by the Million’,
praised the results, proof that standardization did not have to be monot-
onous, that site plans were as important as architecture.54 Construction
technologies and site plans received far more attention than social serv-
ices in all these projects. Antonin Raymond called for ‘small laboratories
of housing with the architects as chief scientists’, such as his project at
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.55 Neutra’s Channel Heights near Los Angeles
arranged four different house types in a bold abstract pattern, making
an asset of the rugged terrain cut by a deep ravine. Gropius’s and
Breuer’s Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, soft-
ened prefab units by adding wood siding and following the contours of
difficult terrain. William Wurster produced 1,700 demountable houses
at Carquenez Heights at the Vallejo shipyards north of San Francisco in
a record 73 days, half the units in plywood, the other half in Homasote.
Ever the pragmatist, Wurster insisted on experimentation along with
results, convincing the government to allocate 25 units for him to try
other methods – skeleton frame, bentwood frame, masonry walls – each
of which proved less expensive than conventional modular systems.56
Inspired low-cost housing was important to Louis Kahn, who formed
a partnership with George Howe in Philadelphia to complete five war-
housing projects. Oskar Stonorov often joined them, and Catherine
Bauer’s ‘office’ occupied a corner of the collective workspace. Their most
ingenious and well-publicized design was Carver Court, a 100-unit
township for African-American steelworkers near Lancaster,
Pennsylvania (1944). Here Kahn first articulated what he called ‘Essential
1 4 5 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
Space’, a concept and formal expression he would sustain until his death.
The initial drawings and the term ground-free alluded to Le Corbusier’s
pilotis, but Kahn’s scheme anticipated changes. Bold concrete forms
raised the living areas off the ground plane to provide spaces that resi-
dents could use for the rituals of their ordinary lives – protecting a car
perhaps, or enclosing a play area or an extra room. A handsome com-
munity centre was another essential, a simple yet unmistakable ‘social
monument’ to forge collective identity.57
Wars often initiate specialized environments for destruction. The
Army sent the émigré architects Antonin Raymond, Konrad Wachsman
and Erich Mendelsohn to Dougway, Utah, to create replicas of typical
Japanese and German villages for incendiary bomb tests. Far more
potent was the vast, once-secret world of the Manhattan Engineer
District (med), which oversaw atomic weapons at four locations eventu-
ally known as Hanford, Washington; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos,
New Mexico; and Alamagordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic-
weapon bomb was tested.
Plans for Oak Ridge came first and grew most quickly, despite utmost
secrecy. The choice of a fledgling architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings &
Kahn, Howe &
Stonorov, Carver
Court housing for
African-American
defence workers,
Coatesville,
Pennsylvania, 1944,
community centre
(left) and housing.
1 4 6
Merrill, with only 25 employees, shows the military’s strategic decision-
making and the long-term implications. Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel
Owings founded a partnership in 1936, then worked on the New York
World’s Fair of 1939 with John Merrill. They affiliated with the Pierce
Foundation to produce a prefabricated Experimental House, which
became the basis for 600 new dwellings at Albert Kahn’s Glenn L. Martin
Aircraft Factory outside Baltimore in 1941. Plans for Oak Ridge began in
June 1942, but six months later med officials expressed frustration that
the initial firm lacked any ‘originality or modern innovations’.58 A secret
committee contracted the Pierce Foundation and its architects. Only
when hostilities ended would the world learn about the 75,000 people
who lived and worked in Oak Ridge, with every building designed and
supervised in secret by the 650 employees of a firm that now called itself
som, an acronym first used in 1949.
There was nothing architecturally significant about Oak Ridge, but
the architects’ teamwork and all-encompassing organization impressed
both government and corporate leaders. As Ambrose Richardson, an
Skidmore, Owings 
& Merrill, K-25
gaseous diffusion
plant for U-235 bomb
material, Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, 1944. 
1 4 7 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
som architect, later explained: ‘We were no longer the starry-eyed young
designers who wanted to rebuild the world in the Le Corbusier, Mies
mold. We did still seek that, tempered by the pragmatism born of an
extraordinary, immediate need. We matured a lot.’59
Progress had been the goal for New Deal and wartime architects,
defined by an amalgam of rigour and risk-taking. Roland Wank put it
clearly in 1941: ‘We seek fulfillment in action.’60 As concerns shifted from
Social Security to national security, government agencies increased the
scale, cost and complexity of their endeavours across the country and
then around the world. Modern ambitions resided in the chillingly
beautiful factories, the vast house-building industry, the scientific-
research organizations, the planned leisure activities. The integrated
networks of institutions and companies that made key decisions during
the war would then commission the most significant post-war architec-
ture. The media baron Henry Luce recognized this when he used his
editorial page in Life to proclaim the war as the dawn of the ‘great
American century’.61
As always, there were alternative voices in politics, intellectual life, the
arts and in architecture. The most vivid came from the two coasts. The
drawings of Charles and Ray Eames captured their enthusiasm about
wartime knowledge. Ray’s covers for Arts & Architecture in the 1940s
115 Charles Eames,
‘What Is a House?’
from Arts &
Architecture
(July 1944).
1 4 8
used vivid abstract shapes to encourage open-ended interpretations.
Citing Buckminster Fuller, Charles emphasized that ‘the miracle of
industry in war would revolutionize the peacetime world’, especially in
much-needed new housing. The sterile parameters of functionalism had
to give way to more personal, sometimes even ephemeral concepts of
human ‘needs’.62 Both of the Eameses anticipated a more cohesive yet
still joyful and individualized national agenda.
TheMuseum of Modern Art synthesized the varied ideas and ambi-
tions of the New Deal and the war years with a series of exhibitions
under Elizabeth Mock. Also Catherine Bauer’s sister, Mock served as act-
ing director of Architecture from 1941 until Philip Johnson ousted her in
1945. Her popular 1944 exhibition and catalogue, Built in usa since 1932,
provided a ‘creative synthesis’ of overlapping currents during that
remarkable decade. The title suggests both a sequel and an antidote to
the famous International Style exhibition of 1932. Mock’s show celebrat-
ed the tva, the fsa, Dunsmuir Flats, Johnson Wax, several Usonian
houses, Taliesin West, New York’s Municipal Asphalt Plant, the Crow
Island School, Carver Court and many of the buildings discussed in this
chapter. Her brief text spoke eloquently about the need for ‘humanizing’
modern architecture, embracing the challenges of science and industry
without neglecting those of environmentalism, emotions and commu-
nity life. Those themes are again resonant today.63
1 4 9 A r c h i t e c t u r e , t h e P u b l i c a n d t h e S t a t e , 1 9 3 3 – 1 9 4 5
I. M. Pei, Alcoa’s
Washington Plaza
Apartments,
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, 1964,
view from a ‘blighted’
neighbourhood, from
Fortune magazine
(October 1964).
Americans felt justly proud when their decisive role in World War Two
catapulted the nation to superpower status. Immediate post-war realities
were difficult, however, with the country plagued for several years by
severe inflation, housing shortages and job scarcities. The ‘gi Bill of
Rights’ promised generous education, health and housing benefits for 11
million returning veterans, but facilities were sorely lacking. The horrors
and deprivations of the war made a safe middle ground seem especially
appealing. Commentators touted social and political consensus – what
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, called ‘the vital center’ in 1949 – as the basis for a
fundamental national character, an American Exceptionalism. The
ascendancy of modern architecture became a central tenet of this accord
throughout the country and the world.
All sorts of angst underlay the ‘nifty fifties’. A cheerful outlook was
always shadowed by the risk of failure, falling from grace by having made
the wrong choice. With the first references to the Cold War in 1948, the
government initiated a military and propaganda campaign of prepared-
ness. Officials promised protection in underground bomb shelters and
curvilinear architectural surfaces that supposedly deflected radioactive
fallout. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s virulent attacks on supposed
Communist infiltration made any criticism seem potentially dangerous.
Competition between companies, cities and neighbours was all the more
intense for being discreetly hidden. The transparency of curtain walls
and picture-windows could not assuage ever-present fears about con-
tamination, subterfuge, spies and secret lives.
Architecture did not escape the ferocity of these tensions. Lewis
Mumford’s 1947 essay ‘The Bay Area’ in the New Yorker attacked the
International Style as placeless and inhumane, then extolled an alterna-
tive Modernism, a ‘free yet unobtrusive expression of the terrain, the
climate, and the way of life’. His title clearly referred to northern
California, past and present, although Mumford resisted provincialism,
lauding similar predilections from Latin America to New England. Philip
Johnson, once again moma’s Curator of Architecture, quickly counter-
c h a p t e r f i v e
The Triumph of Modernism,
1946–1964
attacked, staging a 1948 symposium with an alarmist title: ‘What Is
Happening to Modern Architecture?’ Even a sensitive designer like
Marcel Breuer mocked Mumford’s appeal to humanism. ‘If “human” is
considered identical with redwood all over the place or with imperfec-
tion and imprecision,’ he sneered, ‘then I am against it.’1 The vituperative
tone and aftermath of this event forced the discipline into polarized
camps, contemptuous and soon ignorant of each other: East Coast 
versus West, universalism versus regionalism, radical avant-garde inno-
vations versus adaptive pragmatist experiments.
As if to finalize the break, a 1952 moma exhibition, Built in usa,
acclaimed pristine office buildings, elegant apartment buildings and
suburban dwellings along with one glass-walled industrial structure in
Texas in deference to the 1920s European Modern Movement. Curators
Arthur Drexler and Henry-Russell Hitchcock proclaimed that the ‘qual-
ity and significance’ of post-war American architecture was ‘more
nationally standardized – in a good sense’ and also ‘more luxurious – and
not to balk at a word – beautiful’.2 To buttress the implied comparison
they appropriated the title from Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 show, thereby
erasing its legacy of popular, multifaceted Modernisms.
Modern art was central to the post-war commercial world and to
intellectual resistance against the pervasive influence of ‘mass culture’,
typically attacked as a form of totalitarianism. The avant-garde saw
themselves as outsiders to an establishment that often cultivated them as
it explored a wide range of aesthetics. Clement Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde
and Kitsch’ became a mantra, affirming the intellectual difficulty of ‘gen-
uine art’ by heroic individuals whose rigorous formalism probed the
distinctive medium of their art, whether painting or architecture. ‘The
essence of Modernism,’ he told a Voice of America audience, lay ‘in the
use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline
itself.’3 Critics like Dwight McDonald condemned all aspects of ‘middle-
brow’ or ‘midcult’ taste. Television soon extended the pervasive and
seemingly pernicious realm of popular culture to a mass audience.
Whereas only 5 per cent of households had televisions in 1950, this esca-
lated to almost 90 per cent by the end of the decade. To artists and
intellectuals, the built environments and social worlds on the screen
seemed unspeakably vulgar.
President Harry S. Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers assured
the nation of permanent prosperity so long as American capitalism
experienced continuous growth, regulated by fine-tuned governmental
interventions. Government agencies helped the private sector expand
dramatically, especially producers of building materials and the real-
estate industry. The gross national product soared 250 per cent between
1 5 2
1945 and 1960, while expenditures on new construction multiplied nine-
fold. A prescient 1947 article by Hitchcock dared to suggest that ‘the
Architecture of Bureaucracy’ in large, anonymous firms might be appro-
priate for most needs in post-war society. He acknowledged the
usefulness of an ‘Architecture of Genius’ for monumental structures, but
warned of ‘pretentious absurdity’.4
In principle, all Americans were middle class or almost there. The
unprecedented affluence of the 1950s created the world’s first mass middle
class, roughly half the population by most indicators, with race a major
factor in the split. Real incomes rose for most socio-economic groups, as
did home ownership, while the advent of credit cards and new consumer
goods provided a bounty of comforts known as ‘the good life’. ‘Fitting in’
was a prime goal, and most groups ostracized those who did not abide by
their norms. In many ways the country was more democratic than at any
time in its history, but also more materialistic and intensely conscious
about status. C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951) described businessmen
assuming the trappings of professionals, including their titles, claims of
highly specialized knowledge, and assertions of public interest.
Professionals, including architects, became even more concerned about
their own authority and prestige. Modern architecture was a cornerstone
of these ambitions, whether in civic facilities, office buildings or houses.
Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) compared blue-collar suspicions
of Modernism with its ‘snob-appeal’ for those with aspirations. ‘Eggheadshave enough self-assurance so that they can defy convention’, he contend-
ed, ‘and they often cherish the simplicity of open lay-out.’5
Businessmen and politicians saw the modern metropolis in terms of
orderly development and deplored the dynamic, disorderly world of city
streets. Urban renewal – a generic term taken from 1954 federal legisla-
tion – remains the most controversial aspect of post-war American
growth. The 1949 Housing and Urban Redevelopment Act joined federal
and local governments to ‘modernize’ downtowns and boost property
values by clearing blighted properties to create large parcels that would
attract investors. As experts looked for problems they could ‘solve’, they
fixated on recent African-American migration to major cities, which
increased dramatically during the 1940s and ’50s with the decline of
Southern sharecropping. A major tax liability, this demographic shift
also fuelled ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Title i of the 1949 Act gave re-
development agencies two-thirds of the funds to eradicate blighted areas.
Only 20 per cent of a designated area had to be declared ‘blighted’ for the
entirety to be demolished.
Urban renewal dispossessed more than 400,000 families between
1949 and 1967, federally aided urban highways an additional 330,000. The
1 5 3 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
writer James Baldwin called this ‘Negro removal’, although small-scale
commerce and homes in stable white ethnic neighbourhoods also fell to
the bulldozers. Low-income African-Americans lost the equivalent of
one of every five homes. Replacement or public housing provided for less
than one half of 1 per cent of those displaced. White ethnics scattered
fairly widely, although many experienced a sense of ‘grief ’ as they were
cut off from the ties of family and friends, but racial segregation limited
options for African-Americans, which in turn increased rents and over-
crowding. Black ghettos and all-white suburbs became far more
permanent and pervasive features of American life, what one Soul song
called ‘a chocolate city with vanilla suburbs’, although there were some
all-black suburbs.6
The results transformed American cities almost as radically as their
bombed-out counterparts in Europe and Japan. New building sought to
keep or lure wealthy residents and increase urban tax bases.
Construction standards in Title i housing for middle-class tenants were
notoriously shoddy and favoured small units, making them unsuitable
for families with children. Luxury apartments and corporate office towers
predominated, along with convention centres, stadia and tourist mon-
uments like the St Louis Arch (1947–66). Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center by
Otto Eggert and Daniel Higgins was the nation’s first completed redevel-
opment (1948–53). Mayor David Lawrence then appointed himself head
of the Redevelopment Agency and continued major projects. The 1954
Urban Renewal Act encouraged cities to combine historic preservation
with large-scale new building. Almost 1,600 urban-renewal projects
would be in place by 1965. Highly visible examples include Denver’s Mile
High Center (1952–60), Philadelphia’s Penn Center and Society Hill
(1955–64), San Francisco’s Golden Gateway and Embarcadero Center
(1957–67) and Boston’s Prudential Center and Government Center
(1960–68). By 1960 Fortune magazine could proclaim a revised model of
the American city as ‘a control tower’.7
Scientific and social-scientific discourse helped legitimate architects’
desire for leadership, especially in urban transformations. mit’s Norbert
Wiener, author of Cybernetics (1948), extrapolated from the ‘feedback’
conditions of new information-processing machines. Harvard’s Walter
Gropius favoured the social sciences, cellular biology and nuclear
physics. The main result was analogies about social cohesion, organic
growth and dynamic power in architecture. The Social Science Research
Council sponsored a conference in 1951 about these trends, but quickly
withdrew from the topic in frustration about the vague methods. This
did not curtail architects’ enthusiasm.8 References to quantitative surveys
generated vague norms about the ‘typical office’ or ‘average family’. Facile
Elaine de Kooning in
the de Koonings’ 
Soho loft, New York
City, c. 1958.
1 5 4
‘liveability’ studies evoked psychoanalytic theories and sociological data
to prove the potent effects of home environments.
The familiar story of post-war Modernism gives the illusion of a com-
mon purpose which has obscured significant experiments and variations
in all the arts, including the peripheries of architecture. Some were cre-
ated by inspired ‘outsiders’. Simon Rodia completed Watts Towers in Los
Angeles in 1954 after 33 years of inspired, ad hoc construction. Elusive
‘underground’ artists transgressed boundaries, while small journals
explored broad cultural terrains. The Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis
created the Everyday Art Quarterly (renamed Design Quarterly in 1951).
J. B. Jackson’s Landscape explored ‘new architectural forms’ in the ‘ordinary
realm’, including builders’ houses and drive-in restaurants. The first
semi-programmed, mixed-media ‘happenings’ and live electronic music
were staged; bebop dissonance spurred virtuoso riffs; and painters incor-
porated tattered fragments of mass culture. New York artists
unintentionally suggested a new approach to space, beauty and time
when they began to transform industrial lofts into live/work spaces in the
late 1950s. Faced with abandoned buildings when industries moved out
of the city, landlords were willing to rent cheaply, if illegally. The artists
honed necessity into an aesthetic, transmuting the gritty open spaces of
industrial modernity into a harbinger of future trends in design. Within
a decade, these aesthetic principles would play a visible role in architec-
ture, and three decades later in real estate.
Corporate Modernism
Post-war finance and business launched a ‘systems’ revolution. The econ-
omist and management consultant Peter Drucker led the charge with his
influential book The Concept of the Corporation (1946). Transferring mili-
tary strategies to private business, he hailed a rational model of centralized
management and decentralized operations, each entity a holistic ‘social
institution’. In principle, both individuals and units would identify them-
selves as interchangeable parts in a corporation’s large-scale, standardized
yet more flexible system. Financial and marketing specialists calculated
tactics for continual growth, in part through ‘planned obsolescence’ – a
term coined in 1954, although the basic principle had emerged in the 1920s.
A parallel set of human-relations experts sought to build employee morale
and company loyalty. Prestigious architecture firms synthesized these goals
with new kinds of office buildings based on the subtle distinctions of a sta-
tistical Sublime. Large architect-engineering-construction companies
built generic modern structures with higher capacities and more ‘flexible
space’ – converting a wartime idea to peacetime prosperity.
1 5 6
Interior spaces helped reorganize the day-to-day world of advanced
capitalism after World War Two. Modern paintings and sculpture
adorned the transparent ground-floor lobbies, suggesting lofty principles.
Isamu Noguchi created biomorphic lobby ceilings for two of Harris
Armstrong’s 1947–8 corporate headquarters in St Louis, although most
lobbies were self-consciously understated. Noguchi and other modern
sculptors soon collaborated with architects to design outdoor plazas for
major corporate clients. Art served to humanize business calculations.
Office floors were much larger in the raw space of their footprints and the
‘modular coordination’ of perfectly uniform arrangements. Designers
1 5 7 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Skidmore Owings &
Merrill (Natalie de
Blois and Gordon
Bunshaft, principal
designers), Union
Carbide Building, New
York City, 1960, 
typical officeinterior.
Pietro Belluschi,
Equitable Building,
Portland, Oregon,
1944–8 (today the
Commonwealth
Building), main 
street façade.
replicated the physiognomy of the exterior building modules, subdivid-
ing internal grids with lightweight standardized office partitions, visible
signs of order and flexibility – even if changes were rare. Control extend-
ed to micro-grids of luminous ceiling panels and sealed windows to
ensure a uniform temperature with central air conditioning. The furni-
ture designer Florence Knoll collaborated with major architects to
provide evidence of good taste and orderly employee diligence for elite
corporations. A new profession called ‘space planning’ helped balance
strong public image with efficiency in ordinary offices.
Architects mostly obsessed about façades, especially the transparent
curtain wall, a thin, non-load-bearing cladding ‘hung’ on the structural
frame. The term honed Modernism’s focus on surface or skin, combin-
ing visible transparency with the minimalist elegance of construction
details. Executives shared architects’ beliefs that impeccably coordinated
building systems communicated directly to employees and the public.
The building committee for the Inland Steel headquarters in Chicago
spoke of investing in a ‘unique institutional identification’, or corporate
image; its chairman compared the façade to ‘a man with immaculate
English tailoring’.9
Two precedents were clear at the time: Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt
Berlin project for a glass skyscraper (1921–2) and
Pietro Belluschi’s Equitable Insurance Company
Building in Portland, Oregon (1944–8). Belluschi
had first conceived the latter project for
Architectural Forum’s 1943 series, ‘New Buildings
for 194x’, so he was ready when a pre-war client
approached him the next year for an office build-
ing. Sheathed in thin war-surplus aluminium,
the Equitable rose all of twelve storeys, but its
concrete frame and aluminium spandrels were
virtually flush. Slender ground-level piers clad in
pinkish marble maintained the street wall and a
protected walking corridor for pedestrians. The
absence of parking revealed pre-war origins,
but the interiors were decidedly up-to-date with
open floor plans and exacting climate controls.
The immense glass windows were tinted, insulated
and sealed, washed by an ingenious system sus-
pended from the roof (soon a standard device
around the country). Initially greeted with
resounding praise, the Equitable’s provincial
location then hid it from view until a restoration
1 5 8
in 1988 as the Commonwealth Building reaffirmed its significance as the
first all-glass office tower.
Curtain walls and open, grid-based interiors became trademarks of
Skidmore Owings and Merrill (som) and New York’s Lever House
(1949–52) assured their reputation for prestigious corporate state-
ments. The structure comprised two gleaming asymmetrical frames:
one hovers, a horizontal two-storey plane traversing the site; the other
ascends 24 storeys. Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer in the New York
office, convinced the client to create magnanimous public spaces, a
broad ‘plaza’ under the piloti supports and an exhibition area in the
tower’s glass-enclosed lobby. A provision in the municipal zoning
regulations permitted towers with small footprints to rise as sheer vol-
umes without the setbacks required of 1920s skyscrapers. Bunshaft also
understood architectural symbolism: the transparent façades celebrat-
ed cleanliness for a producer of soaps; lightly green-tinted glass
reduced glare; spandrel glass between floors made the building seem to
float unobtrusively. Its immediate success solidified the shift of New
York’s business and finance from Lower Manhattan to Midtown that
had begun during the 1920s, while glass revolutionized a district
defined by limestone.
som soon acquired four regional offices and high-status international
commissions. Each office balanced collective anonymity with talented
individuals. Natalie de Blois was another chief designer in the New York
office, bringing an incandescent lightness to the Union Carbide and
the Pepsi-Cola buildings (both 1958–60). Walter Netsch provided the
schematics for the Crown-Zellerbach Building in San Francisco (com-
pleted by Chuck Basset in 1959) and then moved to Chicago. Netsch’s
Inland Steel (1954–8) gave prominence to gleaming steel columns rising
the full height of the façade and clearly differentiated internal functions
with a set-back windowless box for elevators, stairs and the hvac system.
Fortune contended that ‘som took Mies’s stainless-steel standard,
warmed it up and sold it as a prestige package to the us businessman.’10
For most architects nothing surpasses New York’s exquisite Seagram
Building on Park Avenue, diagonally across the street from Lever House.
Another narrative of redemption helped build its mythic status. Samuel
Bronfman, president of the corporation, an international whisky-
distribution company, announced a grand new building to celebrate
its centennial in 1954 and selected an architect. His daughter, Phyllis
Lambert, convinced him of the need for higher aspirations. Mies van der
Rohe seemed the pivotal figure who was creating a ‘grammar’ and a
‘poetry’ for modern architecture. ‘You might think this austere strength,
this ugly beauty, is terribly severe’, Lambert explained.‘It is, and yet all the
1 5 9 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
more beauty in it.’11 Assertive individual interventions seem a leitmotif in
American corporate Modernism.
Completed in 1958, the Seagram Building reduced modern architec-
tural form to its simplest, most perfect elements. Clad in sumptuous
travertine and topaz-tinted glass, this sleek box redefined the slab. A
double-height glass entry lightened the massive structure. A grid of
bronze i-beams is welded to the curtain wall at close intervals to evoke
the ideal of structural expression. As with Lever House, the public space
transmuted zoning regulations to permit a perfect rectangular volume
and extended a grand gesture of noblesse oblige. The granite-paved plaza
occupies 48 per cent of the site, raised on a plinth, if only two steps off
the sidewalk. This grand forecourt distances the 38-storey tower from the
street. The interiors are finished with exacting attention and opulent
materials. Every aspect of the building is faultless and therefore neutral,
leading to frequent comparisons with a Greek temple. Lewis Mumford
considered the Seagram Building the ‘Rolls Royce’ of contemporary
buildings, while Manfredo Tafuri spoke of its ‘aloof ’ character, ‘tragically
. . . self-aware’ of its superiority.12
The quality of Mies’s building encouraged architects to believe that
singular artworks allowed them to operate within a commercialized
world, uncontaminated by commercial influences. Critical analysis
focused on nuances of intellectual and formal rigour. Colin Rowe’s 1956
essay, ‘Chicago Frame’, sought to distinguish unique works of art by mas-
ter architects from the standardized veneers of buildings by commercial
architects. Yet the inevitability of inexpensive copies raised a critical
dilemma, given modern architecture’s inherent drive towards replica-
tion. Every society confronts differences in economic leverage and
technical skills. Rather than simply deploring inevitable copying, how
can modern architects help improve urban streetscapes? 
Many companies moved their headquarters to suburban locations
where inexpensive land facilitated rambling low-rise facilities and easy
expansion. Most industrial or business parks of the 1950s were haphazard
groupings of bland structures with insipid landscapes, but some corpo-
rate ‘campuses’ were impeccably elegant. The General Motors Technical
Center outside Detroit, commissioned in 1945, set a high standard even as
it drew on the audacity of popular culture. Having overtaken Ford as the
industry leader, gm’s chairman, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr, took up Drucker’s cor-
porate programme of centralized policy-makingand decentralized
operations. Recognizing the pent-up demand for exciting new automo-
biles, he added vibrant stylistic imagery to the package, appointing gm’s
chief stylist, Harley J. Earl, as the first Vice-President of Design of any cor-
poration. Earl initiated a series of remarkable changes, not just tail fins
1 6 1 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Mies van der Rohe and
Philip Johnson,
Seagram Building, New
York City, 1954–8.
and two-tone paint, but the annual model change, which he called
‘dynamic obsolescence’: the creation of desire for the latest styling.
Although Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s design for the gm Center began as
a joint project, Eero took over after his father’s death in 1950. His appear-
ance on a 1952 Time cover celebrated the Center’s rigorous engineering,
especially the early curtain-wall sections and the 1.5-metre modular sys-
tem. Thomas Church’s landscape design accentuated the ordered
horizontality of the composition, offset by a tall, elliptical water tower
and a sleek, low dome for Earl’s exhibition extravaganzas. Building
mock-ups allowed for systematic development, replacing the hagio-
graphic ideal of aloof genius with models of collaboration and feedback.
Eleven vibrant colours of glazed ceramic-brick walls distinguished
various research functions, carried through to details, furnishings, even
the colour of push-pins inside each building. Eero soon delved into
American car culture with Neoprene gaskets and sleek glass, all specially
produced by gm. He paid homage to Earl’s famous spokes and tail fins
in the main public lobby. Some custodians of high culture sneered at
Saarinen’s ‘immoral’ styling as an assault on the dignity of ‘true’
Modernism. He seemed too comfortable with big businessmen, his
designs too appealing to the popular press. When the gm complex
opened in 1956, Life called it a ‘Versailles of Industry’.13
Office buildings were often staid glass boxes, but sometimes startling.
Suppliers encouraged adventurous applications to promote their 
Eliel and Eero
Saarinen, General
Motors Technical
Center, Warren,
Michigan, 1945–56,
view to exhibition
dome, from GM
brochure Where
Today Meets
Tomorrow.
1 6 2
General Motors
Technical Center,
lobby.
1 6 3 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
products: Harrison & Abramowitz glorified one material at the Corning
Glass Center in New York in 1951, another in the Alcoa Aluminum
Company offices in Davenport, Iowa, and in the clip-on diamond-
faceted panels of the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters in 1953. A court
ruling that aluminium, the first man-made metal, had to allow competi-
tion prompted the rival companies to commission audacious new
corporate structures and scores of other uses from parking garages to
housing. One of the most surprising is surely Minoru Yamasaki’s ‘archi-
tecture of delight’ with gold-anodized aluminium screens on the
Reynolds Metals Regional Office in Detroit in 1961.
Exuberant vivacity was more common outside the East Coast. Even
banks, usually quite sedate, invested in eye-catching architecture. Three
Oklahoma City banks are still surprising. The eponymous Gold Dome
(1958), the undulating concrete shells of the drive-through facilities at
Central National Bank (1960), and the State Capitol Bank (1963), known
locally as the ‘flying saucer bank’ and often featured in the national
media, were all designed by the hometown firm of Roloff, Bailey, Bozalis,
Dickinson. Enrique Gutierrez’s Bacardi usa (1963) in Miami translated
Mies’s Seagram Building into a Latin idiom, decorating two walls with
resplendent murals in glazed-ceramic tiles from Spain. Commercial
architecture in Miami seemed to dance as the strong relief on its façades
(today known as Mi-Mo) accentuated colour, texture, shadows and other
sensual delights.
The physics historian Peter Galison has highlighted the emergence of
‘Big Science’, typically dispersed away from major cities, during the post-
war era. Post-war federal agencies funded scientific research and facilities
in every field from atomic energy to zoology. The National Science
Foundation, created in 1950, would see its influence soar after the Russians
launched Sputnik in 1957. Large generic buildings proliferated for major
chemical companies, pharmaceuticals, the energy industry and aeronau-
tics during the Cold War. Galison links these spatial practices with modern
art and architecture, as well as with the emergence of the ‘military-indus-
trial complex’, a term first used in President (former General) Dwight
Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech to the nation.14 Modern architecture was
closely linked to defence contracts as well as to corporate power.
SiliconValley emerged in the farmland between San Francisco and
San José just after World War Two. Stanford University Vice-President
Fred Terman established the Stanford Industrial Park in 1946 to encour-
age industry collaboration in high-tech research. Hewlett-Packard
joined immediately since Terman had helped his former graduate stu-
dents Hewlett and Packard set up a workspace in a Palo Alto garage in
1938 – now revered as a national landmark. The site was soon given a
more stately name: Stanford Research Center. The landscape architect
Thomas Church designed the 265-hectare site plan, while Terman him-
self established regulations about informal low-rise buildings and helped
choose architects. Some were major figures, notably Erich Mendelsohn,
who designed the headquarters for Varian Associates, and John
Warnecke, who designed General Electric’s microwave division. A
similar, if less cohesive approach, took hold elsewhere, most conspic-
uously along Route 128 outside Boston, Massachusetts.
Roloff, Bailey,
Bozalis, Dickinson,
State Capitol Bank,
Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma, 1963.
1 6 4
The embryonic information-technology industry sometimes spon-
sored notable modern architecture. O’Neil Ford, the architect of the
Texas Instruments Semiconductor Building in Richardson, Texas
(1956–8), invited the Mexican architect-engineer Felix Candela to collab-
orate on the hyperbolic paraboloid shapes supported by pre-cast
concrete tetrapods. Recognizing that this emerging industry required
continuous technology upgrades, Ford created the first full interstitial
floor between working floors. To encourage employees’ collaboration, he
accentuated landscaped areas and hand-crafted wooden screens in
abstract patterns, both integral to his Modernism.
Meanwhile ibm’s Thomas Watson, Jr, began a complete makeover
geared to computers in 1952. Watson hired Eliot Noyes to oversee the sleek
‘new look’ that encompassed product design, flexible ‘horizontal’ manage-
ment and architecture: 150 plants, laboratories and office buildings
throughout the world in the succeeding fifteen years.15 Noyes gave Eero
Saarinen several important commissions, notably the Watson Research
Center (1957–61) in Yorktown Heights, New York, an enormous arc – 300
metres long, 45 metres wide and three storeys high – with sleek glass prom-
enades on the front and rear, echoed by interior corridors. Saarinen kept the
sight lines under 30 metres to avoid vertigo. Saarinen also designed a
research structure for Bell Laboratories (1957–62) in Holmdel, New Jersey,
using dark mirrored glass to reduce heat gain, ensure security and provide
another signature façade. Such distinctive architecture has now set preser-
vationists against the companies as they seek to replace their outdated
research buildings.
Healthcare followed a similar pattern. The National Institute of Health
sponsored multi-purpose hospitals for veterans while an emergent corpo-
rate medicine combined federal research funds with private-sector profits.
O’Neil Ford, Texas
Instruments
Semiconductor
Building, Richardson,
Texas, 1956–8, con-
struction photograph.
1 6 5 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
The Texas Medical Center in Houston became world-famous when its 1947
campus added nine specializedhospitals in the succeeding six years, along
with adjacent education and medical-office buildings. The centrepiece, the
M. D. Anderson Cancer Center (1951–4) by MacKie & Kamrath, set new
standards for oncological surgery, treatment, research and teaching. In the
words of Architectural Forum, the building synthesized ‘a complex indus-
trial plant’ with Wrightian ‘organic architecture’.16 The multi-level
integration of landscapes added visual richness and therapeutic calm.
If Houston provided the model for recombinant expansion, Louis
Kahn created two architectural monuments for medical research with
two laboratory settings. The Richards Medical Research Building
Salk Institute, section
showing Vierendeel
trusses. 
1 6 6
Louis I. Kahn, Salk
Institute for Biological
Studies, La Jolla,
California, 1959–65,
view of studies and
courtyard.
(1957–61) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia replaced
impersonal corridors with clusters of small labs in three eight-storey
towers. Kahn’s humanistic systems analysis differentiated ‘served’ spaces
for human work from ‘servant’ spaces for mechanical equipment, rele-
gated to a fourth tower, although some scientists complained that
symbolism trumped functionalism. Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological
Studies (1959–65) in La Jolla, California, took these ideas about order to
a transcendent plane. A thin channel of water slices the spare central
court, leading towards the Pacific and seemingly towards infinity. Two
rows of four-storey concrete towers, open at ground level and angled for
views of the sea, contain private studies and collective labs. Full intersti-
tial service floors of pre-stressed Vierendeel trusses afford seismic
support. Cloistered bridges, staircases and courtyards link the work-
places with chalkboards set into the walls at the junctures to encourage
impromptu exchanges. Unpainted teak panels have weathered to soft
antique patinas. Kahn’s attention to minute details evoked scientific pre-
cision. The fundamentals of biological research and architectural
systems entered the realm of the Sublime.
‘Good-life’ Modernism
‘Like them or not,’ announced Time in 1949, ‘modern houses are here to
stay [with] practicality and sometimes spectacular good looks.’17 New
houses for all classes came fully equipped with status, individuality, high-
tech amenities and the natural Sublime. It took some time, however. Five
years after the armistice the Housing Act of 1949 finally generated a long-
awaited surge. An astounding 2 million dwelling units went up in 1950,
and a total of more than 13 million between 1950 and 1960 – 11 million of
them in the suburbs, which grew six times faster than cities. The elusive
promise of security in the suburbs drove private emotions and public
policy. Washington endorsed suburban decentralization as protection
against a Russian nuclear attack. Indirect federal subsidies included
income-tax benefits and expanded mortgage programmes, each costing
the government at least five times more than it spent on housing subsi-
dies for the poor.
A formidable cultural apparatus promoted modern suburban houses.
Art museums in New York, San Francisco and Minneapolis sponsored
full-scale model homes for general audiences, as did popular magazines
and television programmes. The houses varied, of course, given the
national desire for individual expression, but Modernism triumphed,
especially in systems of production and spatial organization. Structural
components were highly visible. Wartime synthetics like acrylic sky-
1 6 7 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
lights, durable laminates, sandwich panels and new kinds of plywood
became standard. Advanced technologies for comfort included insula-
tion (rare before World War Two), automatic heating, passive solar
orientation – and then a rush to air conditioning in the early 1950s. Built-
in facilities and storage walls provided for a conspicuous increase in
consumer goods.
The flow of space emphasized ‘zones’ rather than rooms, in part to
cope with reductions in size. A ‘master bedroom’ was separated from
children’s bedrooms, and two new spaces appeared, an outlying
utility/laundry room and the ‘family room’ at the centre. First awkwardly
called a ‘don’t-say-no’ place for children and teenagers, it linked the open
kitchen and outdoor patio. The architect-authors of Tomorrow’s House
and the editors of Parents’ Magazine christened the newborn space
almost simultaneously in 1946–7. Architecture magazines lavished atten-
tion on open living areas and attention-getting roofs, including
alternatives to the flat roof, much-maligned for its orthodoxy and its ten-
dency to leak, but gave little attention to site.18 Shelter magazines like
House Beautiful defined ‘the American Style idea’ in similar terms:
honest use of simple materials, comfort not show, privacy and view,
Jones & Emmons for
Eichler Homes, family
room in a model
house in Sunnyvale,
California, 1955. First
Award of Honor from
the AIA and the
National Association
of Home Builders.
1 6 8
indoors and outdoors ‘perfectly integrated’. These articles also stressed
more overtly political references to ‘freedom of choice’ and the ‘drive for
something better’.19
Two well-known modernists became popular heroes at this time.
House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon lauded Frank Lloyd Wright’s
‘greater principles’ as emblematic of American values. House and Home’s
article ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and 1,000,000 Homes a Year’ (1953) explained
how speculative builders could adapt specific techniques to make small
houses seem more commodious. Richard Neutra was equally well
received, the evangelist of therapeutic houses that increased psychologi-
cal and physiological well-being. A Time cover story from 1949 praised
his ability to merge spaciousness with compactness, exemplified in the
magnificent Kaufmann House in Palm Springs shown behind him in the
cover photo. Time praised Neutra as a leader in the movement 
to ‘humanize and domesticate’ the International Style.20 Each of his
domestic landscapes was highly specific; the house plans stretched out
lithely, often dematerializing into their surroundings, especially where
Richard Neutra,
Kaufmann House,
Palm Springs,
California, 1946–7.
1 6 9 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
sliding glass doors opened onto heated terraces. Neutra explored gestalt
psychology to affect illusions of infinite space. He also worked diligently
on possible mass prototypes, seeking to convert consumerism into pro-
gressive environmental design – indeed into Survival through Design, the
title of his well-received 1954 book.
Arts & Architecture’s Case Study Program helped popularize modern
houses for a limited audience. The editor John Entenza issued a call for
innovation in January 1945, then marketed 36 model dwellings over the
next eighteen years, hoping to stimulate cooperation with industries
(notably in metals) and to influence speculative housing. House #8
(1945–9) by Charles and Ray Eames was an epiphany for architects
around the world. The Eames House literally captured the post-war
sense of open possibilities since it transformed an initial neo-Miesian
scheme, its foundation already poured, into a serendipitous assemblage
with off-the-shelf industrial components set in an exposed steel frame.
Structural rigour joined with a joyful interplay of colour and light, seem-
ingly impromptu yet carefully staged. The overlapping social spaces
extended into small niches with designated bedroom and studio areas,
providing a flexible live/work environment for this husband-and-wife
team, a distinct contrast to the exaggerated gender roles that defined
most houses. Yet even this remarkable prototype remained a one-off.21
Suburban mass housing went modern for many reasons, including
scale. Whereas a typical builder might have put up five houses a year
before the war, speculative builders now generated instant subdivisions
with thousands of tracthouses, mostly indistinguishable from one
another, which soon accounted for 80 per cent of American produc-
tion.22 The phenomenon of mass builders cannot be isolated from
modernist dreams of standardized mass production. Architecture maga-
zines assured readers that Modernism could happily coexist with
merchant builders and the American mass market. For several years they
promoted collaborations, offering useful design advice and pleading for
alternatives to what was already recognized as sprawl.23
Most builders simply bulldozed greenfield sites to make the terrain
uniform, then mixed conventional post-and-beam construction with
factory production to cut costs. Levitt & Sons converted a potato field in
Long Island, New York, into the first Levittown between 1947 and 1951. By
1950 the company’s offsite factory was producing one four-room house
every sixteen minutes. Like gm, Levitt produced a new model every year
with special ‘built-in’ features that quickly became commonplace for
other builders. Behind the traditional façades were modern amenities:
radiant-heated concrete slabs replaced basements; double-glazed sliding
windows and doors that extended onto patios; three-way fireplaces that
1 7 1 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Charles and Ray
Eames, Eames House
(Case Study House #8),
Pacific Palisades,
California, 1945–9.
provided a centrifugal focus for open plans – a device borrowed from
Frank Lloyd Wright. Modernism endorsed standardization, which
extended to homogeneity of class, race and religion as suburbs grew
increasingly segmented.24
Modern architects had a significant effect on some impressive, racially
integrated white-collar developments. In 1948 the developer Robert
Davenport hired Charles Goodman to craft an idyllic progressive suburb
outside Washington, dc. By 1952 Hollin Hills had almost 500 homes,
variations on Goodman’s fourteen different models. The landscape
architect Dan Kiley maintained the existing topography, kept most of the
trees and avoided visible references to property lines. The aia considered
it exemplary American design. The architecture critic Michael Sorkin,
who grew up in Hollin Hills, remembers it as ‘one of the truly happy
experiments in modernity’.25
Joseph Eichler built some 12,000 California houses between 1949 and
1968, all resolutely modern, economical and still appealing. Anshen &
Allen designed early prototypes for subdivisions in the Bay Area. In 1951
Eichler turned to Quincy Jones, an innovative young architect in Los
Angeles, after both received Architectural Forum awards. Expanding into
the southern California market, Eichler commissioned prototypes from
Jones & Emmons, Raphael Soriano and Pietro Belluschi. Jones and
Eichler designed a Case Study neighbourhood project of 200 small eco-
Charles Goodman for
Robert Davenport,
Hollin Hills, Virginia,
suburb of
Washington, DC, land-
scape design by
Daniel Kiley, 1948,
from the AIA’s
1857–1957: One
Hundred Years of
Architecture in
America (1957).
1 7 2
logical houses in 1961, never built because of opposition to fees for the
community services.
Several architects challenged normative models by insisting on purity,
occasionally to the point of didactic all-glass houses. Mies’s house for Dr
Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois (1945–51), exposed yet sealed off from
the outside world, proved so expensive and frustrating that the client
sued the architect unsuccessfully. Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House
copied Mies’s with ‘a form of exhibitionism’ that launched his own
career. It also helped breed some 80 flat-roofed ‘Harvard boxes’ near the
staid town of New Canaan, Connecticut.26
Regional Modernism flourished from Oregon to Florida, engendering
softer variants on the glass box. Igor Polivitzky’s Bird-Cage House in
Miami (1949) encased a glass-and-steel-frame dwelling in plastic screens,
providing almost total integration with the environment. The Sarasota
wunderkind Paul Rudolph took a slightly different path. His glass houses
used wooden jalousies drawn from Southern vernacular traditions that
allowed residents to change the walls in line with their personal responses
to climate and desires for privacy. The thin inverted-catenary roof of his
1950 Healy Guest House, known as the ‘Cocoon House’, was stabilized like
a tent with cables and steel straps, then sprayed with a thin coat of Saran-
vinyl ‘cocoon’ invented to protect battleships. The peripatetic Harwell
Hamilton Harris, Dean at the University of Texas in the 1950s, distin-
guished the parochial, backward-looking ‘Regionalism of Restriction’
1 7 3 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Paul Rudolph, Healy
Guest House (‘Cocoon
House’), Sarasota,
Florida, 1950.
from this ‘Regionalism of Liberation’ or
locally based experiments that explored
‘emerging ideas’.27
Government agencies enthusiastically
supported another kind of experiment,
prefabrication, seeking technological solu-
tions for problems of affordability. Many
such companies collapsed, Lustron most
notoriously, beset by financial irregulari-
ties, restrictive local building codes and
exaggerated promises, but some 300 firms
were producing factory-built houses by
1956, accounting for 10 per cent of the
nation’s total output. Innovations required
testing and small-scale production, so
thoughtful designs by Edward Barnes,
Henry Dreyfus and Charles Goodman
reached only a small market, as did Carl
Koch’s series of inventions that began with
folding stressed-skin panels on the Acorn
House (1948). Koch later reflected that
architects find it difficult to consider site
plans, ongoing adaptations and marketing,
preferring ‘to focus on completely new prototypes’.28
The country saw many variations on basic types. Houston, Texas,
enjoyed a decade of flat-roofed, steel-framed Miesian courtyard houses
of all sizes and price tags. Good Housekeeping chose a design by Lars Bang
as one of ten ‘Outstanding Small Houses of the Year’ in 1954. Esther
McCoy noted that ‘architectural misfits tripled during the 1950s’, espe-
cially in the West, encouraging an engagement more experiential than
cerebral.29 Iconoclasts experimented with biomorphic forms and unusu-
al materials. Bruce Goff favoured plastics and corrugated metal. John
Lautner shaped concrete and added surprises like 750 drinking glasses set
as skylights in the coffered concrete ceiling of the Sheats-Goldstein
House in Los Angeles (1963). Several Lautner houses have starred in
blockbuster movies, iconic expressions of audacity and divergence from
conventional norms, akin to the Playboy Bachelor Pad of the era.30
Multi-family housing was fairly restrained in comparison with the
experimentation of pre-war examples. Insurance companies and hospitals
used redevelopment funds to finance huge urban enclaves, some fortu-
nately relieved by thoughtful landscaping. Mies again provided the ideal
model with two luxury towers at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago
Lars Bang, Bendit
House, Houston,
Texas, 1954, from
Good Housekeeping
(1954).
1 7 4
(1949–51), so inexorably uniform that
they make no accommodations to sun
or wind conditions. moma praised the
immaculate pair as ‘Metropolis
defined’, precisely because these ‘for-
midable urban objects’ provoked an
emotional response to urban life ‘so
well described by Franz Kafka’.31 The
young Herbert Greenwald developed
the project, recognizing Mies’s towering talent and the need to keep it in
check by providing conventional rooms rather than completely open
spaces for the apartments. A decade later, Bertrand Goldberg’s cylindri-
cal towers at Marina City (1959–64), also in Chicago, offered a more
flamboyant prototype and a mixed-use programme.
Low-rise garden apartments re-emerged in the mid-1950s. Herbert
Greenwald decided to acquire Gratiot, a large urban-renewal site in
Detroit that had laid dormant since the initial clearance in 1950. The iit
faculty began the first section, called Lafayette Park, planned by Ludwig
Hilberseimer witha relatively informal landscape by Alfred Caldwell and
an extraordinary collection of Mies’s architecture, including two-storey
townhouses, single-storey courtyard houses and three high-rise apart-
ment towers. Unfortunately, Greenwald died in 1959, leaving the eight
other parcels uncompleted; they were sold off separately. As at other
renewal sites, former residents could not afford the new accommoda-
tions, but the project was racially integrated and may embody a rare
success, both spatially and socially.
Charles Goodman collaborated with the Reynolds Metal Company
on River Park Mutual Homes (1959–62), which stand out amid the largely
failed renewal area of south-west Washington, dc. Two nine-storey
apartment buildings and barrel-roofed townhouses share common
spaces. Both showcased aluminium with patterned screens that cast
lyrical shadows. Similar qualities pervade the wooden geometries of St
Francis Square, a San Francisco union cooperative by Marquis & Stoller,
completed in 1961. This unusual super-block combined four city blocks
into housing and a school. The 299 apartments are stacked three storeys
high, arranged as seven groups around three major open spaces. The
limited budget forced restraint, so the hilly site provides variety, accen-
tuated by the interplay of decks, balconies and pathways. Lawrence
Halprin’s landscape plan accentuated vistas, pedestrian connections
and various areas for sitting or children’s play, relegating parking to the
periphery. This remains one of the country’s finest examples of afford-
able housing.
John Lautner, Sheats-
Goldstein House, Los
Angeles, 1963, as
shown in the movie
Charlie’s Angels: Full
Throttle (2003).
1 7 5 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Mies van der Rohe,
860–880 Lake Shore
Drive, Chicago,
1949–51.
860–880 Lake Shore
Drive, site plan and
initial floor plan.
‘Mid-Century Modernism’ housing now commands attention in lavish
architecture books, popular magazines and specialized real-estate firms.
Even the moderate-cost, small-scale urban housing of the post-war years
is again finding favour, especially when informal compositions are merged
with environmentally conscious site-planning. Smaller garden-apartment
complexes in Miami, Chicago, and San Diego merit reconsideration. So
do the two-storey stucco apartment buildings of Los Angeles – dubbed
‘dingbats’ by Reyner Banham in reference to the prevalence of starburst
ornamentation that resembled the asterisk-like printing symbol.32 James
Marston Fitch remarked that ‘one of the most curious problems facing the
architectural editor of a national magazine is trying to keep good West
Coast dwellings from monopolizing its pages’.33
Public housing represents a small but controversial aspect of 1950s
Modernism. Most officials and architects embraced the high-rise
super-block as economical, even beneficial, convinced that it protected
residents from ‘contamination’ by the surrounding slums. The costs of
the Korean War compounded with Congressional antagonism against
services for the poor to slash funding and obliterate many good inten-
tions. Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis (1950–54) is a case in point. Both critics and
the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, ignored the fact that the original plans
had been scuttled. The descent from ideals to actualities shocked reform-
ers like Elizabeth Wood, then Director of the Chicago Housing Authority
(cha). In 1945 she called for planning to be ‘bold and comprehensive –
or it is useless and wasted’.34 The next decade revealed how concentrated
locations aggravated problems of racial segregation. When Wood tried to
1 7 7 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Mies van der Rohe,
Lafayette Park,
Detroit, Michigan,
1955–8.
integrate and disperse Chicago’s housing, she was immediately dis-
missed. She went on to write Housing Design: A Social Theory (1961), a
thoughtful argument for better alternatives and more resident involve-
ment. Meanwhile, cha’s Robert Taylor Houses by Shaw Metz &
Associates (1960–63) packed 27,000 residents into 28 virtually identical
16-storey towers on a 3.2-kilometre-long super-block – the largest such
project in the world, now mostly demolished for a mixed-income hope
vi enclave that depletes much needed housing for the poor.
The 1950s also saw a rise in second homes at ski and beach resorts,
including modern icons like Neutra’s Kaufmann House and Rudolph’s
Cocoon House. Wartime values of mobility, restraint and climatic adap-
tation remained strong for a decade with informal open plans and
playful shapes, mostly in wood. ‘Vacation houses’ could be small and
flimsy, thereby legitimizing poor construction standards, especially in
Miami and other fast-growing southern cities. Government propaganda
insisted that all American workers enjoyed holiday homes like the one
displayed at the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow, designed by
Andrew Geller for the All-State Development Corporation. Made
famous as the site of the famous Kitchen Debate between Richard
Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, it quickly became a prototype for several
hundred ‘Leisurama Homes’ sold through the department store Macy’s.
Although Geller’s custom-designed beach houses remained economical
and whimsically adventurous, the country’s 3 million second homes
1 7 8
Charles Goodman,
River Park Mutual
Homes, Washington,
DC, 1959–62, night
view. 
Marquis & Stoller, 
St Francis Square,
San Francisco,
California, 1960–61,
view of housing from
courtyard.
St Francis Square,
site plan.
would gradually become more elaborate and expensive in the early
1960s.35
Spaces for Leisure and Learning
The problem of monuments preoccupied post-war architects and critics,
who wondered how to represent unity in contemporary democratic soci-
eties. Neo-classicism virtually disappeared in civic buildings as private
architects replaced bureaucratic designers. The first great example was
the United Nations. Nelson Rockefeller donated a prime parcel of land,
determined to make Manhattan the world capital for trade and diplomacy.
A stellar team of international architects was assembled to create the
‘Workshop of Peace’ under the leadership of the Rockefeller favourite
Wallace Harrison.36 The contentious design process began in 1948; by
1954 it was complete: a horizontal Assembly Building with a curved roof
line (and a dome as well, to entice a loan from Congress) alongside a tall
curtain-wall slab for the Secretariat.
Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic (great-circle) domes were non-specific
solutions to any building task, based on a universal, tetrahedral cosmos
of tensegrity mathematics. Fuller both criticized and exemplified
Americans’ romance with techno-science. Each invention was a simula-
tion of natural and social systems, a means for ongoing exploration,
Hellmuth, Yamasaki
and Leinweber, Pruitt-
Igoe public housing,
St Louis, Missouri,
1950–55, photo-
graphed in 1955.
1 8 0
although both he and his disciples tended to take them as higher truths.
The lightweight demountable dome was omnipresent for almost two
decades. The Marines deployed them in the early 1950s. The United
States Information Agency (usia) took a portable dome to international
trade fairs and exhibitions, eager to tout American ingenuity and tech-
nological prowess around the world. Fuller built a giant aluminium
dome for the Ford Motor Company headquarters in Dearborn,
Michigan, and others for a railway company in Shreveport, Louisiana, for
Miami’s Seaquarium and for the Climatron at St Louis’s Botanical
Garden. Architecture students around the country constructed domes
outside their schools, confident of a spiritual and technological revolu-
tion. Over 300,000 geodesic domes based on Fuller’s patents were erected
between 1954 and his death in 1983.37
Embassies, military installations and other international buildings
were equally significant representations of democracy and free enter-
prise. The State Department’s Foreign Buildings Office oversaw more
than 200projects in 72 countries, determined to enhance America’s
prestige and underscore its technological prowess. Most of the struc-
tures were emphatically modern. som designed several incarnations of
an Amerika Haus in Germany, all variations on the rectangular glass
houses intended to ‘sell America’.38 The best known embassies were
modern too, notably those in New Delhi by Edward Durell Stone (1959);
1 8 1 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Andrew Geller, Elkin
House, Amagansett,
New York, 1966,
calendar from Second
Homes magazine.
R. Buckminster Fuller,
portable US Trade
Pavilion, Kabul,
Afghanistan, 1956.
1 8 2
in Baghdad by Josep Lluís Sert (1961); and in Athens by Gropius/tac
(1962).
Flashy modern buildings for leisure were a conspicuous sign of
American well-being in the post-war era. As flashy automobiles kept
people on the move, Douglas Haskell acclaimed what he called ‘Googie
Architecture’ in a 1952 article, taking the name from John Lautner’s bril-
liant collision of fragmented planes on a 1949 Los Angeles coffee shop.39
Commercial architects of the post-war era delighted in mixing synthetic
materials, bright colours and startling shapes, often derived from engi-
neering advances like ‘cheese-holes’ in steel-webs, rippled or folded-plate
roofs, concrete-shell vaults, and exaggerated diagonal or free-form
(‘woggle’) supports. The razzmatazz had a broad popular appeal that
soon extended to franchises like McDonald’s parabolic Golden Arches,
designed in 1952 by Stanley Meston. In contrast, most post-war modern
artists and intellectuals deplored the honky-tonk quality of the strip,
resort hotels and middle-brow buildings like coffee shops or bowling
alleys. Lautner insisted that the connection with ‘Googie’ hurt his career
as a serious architect. As with Team X in Europe, the ideal vernacular was
far away and exotic, not the commercial world close at hand.
Car-oriented suburban developers invented the regional shopping
centre just after World War Two. Seattle’s Northgate by John Graham
set the basic formula in the years 1947–50: a freeway-intersection loca-
tion, underground tunnels for deliveries, ample parking and fixed
Douglas Honnold,
Biff’s Coffee Shop,
Panorama City, San
Fernando Valley,
California, 1950.
layouts, albeit increasing in size. Suburban shoppers found a semblance
of community life – privately owned with every detail calibrated to
encourage consumerism as the emblem of American happiness. Victor
Gruen’s Southdale (1954) outside Minneapolis introduced the first
‘mall’: fully enclosed, climate-controlled, landscaped, evoking
European gallerias in a lively, two-level central court. ‘Integrated plan-
ning’ considered everything from financing to human scale and visual
surprises. Gruen soon appropriated these elements for pedestrian
malls – he called them ‘community leisure centers’ – seeking to revital-
ize main streets in small cities. But larger shopping centres grew
rapidly and, like housing, increasingly segmented to draw different
socio-economic classes.40
More Americans could afford vacations at exotic resort hotels repre-
senting the ‘tropical Modernism’ of sensuous Caribbean retreats designed
by Toro & Ferrer, Edward Durell Stone and Igor Polivitzky. Miami Beach
had an astounding concentration of these, notably Morris Lapidus’s eight
1 8 3 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
‘flabbergast’ hotels, as he rightly called them, drawing on his previous
experience in theatre and retail plus a few tricks from Baroque Rome. He
was sincerely convinced that ‘the new sensualism’ fulfilled fundamental
‘emotional cravings’.41 The word ‘motel’ (from motor and hotel) entered
American dictionaries and lives after World War Two. Some were glam-
orous, even voluptuous, like Paul Lundy’s Warm Mineral Springs Motel in
Venice, Florida (1958) and Paul Williams’s La Concha in Las Vegas (1962).
Las Vegas hit the limelight in 1946 with the Flamingo, its first mod-
ern (as opposed to cowboy-themed) hotel-casino. Spectacular
competitors soon lined the Strip, most designed by car-oriented archi-
tects from Los Angeles, notably Wayne McAllister, Welton Beckett and
Douglas Honnold. A major shift occurred in 1957 with the emergence
Victor Gruen
Associates,
Southdale Mall,
Edina, Minnesota,
1954.
1 8 4
of Young Electric Sign Company (yesco). This specialist extraordi-
naire in neon and flashing lights designed signs for the 1957 Mint
Casino and 1958 Stardust Hotel, the latter billed as the largest hotel in
the world with 1,000 rooms. This changed basic relationships along
the fabled Strip, where brilliant signs now upstaged the cheap and
basic architecture.
A Boeing 707 carried Pan-Am’s first non-stop flight to Europe in 1958,
inaugurating ‘jet-age’ culture. Airports needed much larger runways and
enticing modern structures for the surge in travel. Minoru Yamasaki’s
Lambert-St Louis Airport Terminal (1956) had already suggested a new
idiom with its soaring, thin-shell groin vaults. The New York Port
Authority then proposed the novel idea of separate structures for each
airline, seemingly more efficient and a sight-seeing attraction as well.
The original ‘Seven Wonders’ at New York’s Idlewild (now Kennedy)
Airport were glorious; the most spectacular was Eero Saarinen’s twa
terminal, which opened in 1962. Saarinen’s ‘form-world’ entailed a total
environment. This one extended from the beak-like canopy entrance
and upward-soaring wings to voluptuous interiors, even to details like
stair railings and heating ducts. Douglas Haskell fondly called the struc-
ture ‘Eero’s “big bird” in concrete’. Within a few years several
mass-market magazines were noting the build-up of auxiliary buildings,
the ‘Airport City’ as a hub for travelling businessmen who became ‘cor-
porate gypsies’.42 No longer adequate by the 1990s, even the famous
twa Terminal was threatened with demolition. A preservation move-
ment has convinced Jet Blue to use it for some flights, thus lending
cachet to budget travel.
New cultural institutions re-energized the experience of public space.
Museums embraced contemporary
art and architecture for new build-
ings and extensions to City
Beautiful temples of the early twen-
tieth century. Louis Kahn’s 1953
addition to the Yale Art Gallery in
New Haven, Connecticut, was his
first significant building, an open
grid around a massive round stair-
well with an exposed space-frame of
concrete tetrahedrons to maximize
flexibility for installations. The
bravura of other structures generat-
ed early conflicts about the ‘edifice
complex’.43 Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Morris Lapidus,
Americana Hotel, Bal
Harbor, Florida, 1957,
drawing of entrance.
1 8 5 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was immediately con-
troversial, especially the spiralling ramp and the ‘great-room’ lobby,
which he likened to being inside a seashell. Wright began the first design
in 1943, modified the concept in 1952 with a change in client and patron,
then completed the museum in 1959. Originally intended solely for ‘non-
objective’, or abstract, painting, the curved walls of the galleries were
meant to ‘liberate’ each picture, allowing it be seen independently and in
the changing conditions of natural light. Critics, including many artists,
reviled the building’s ‘egomaniacal’ upstaging of artwork. But the public
loved the dramatic spatial experience from the day it opened.
As high culture became more democratic, it often lost the vivacious
exuberance of nineteenth-century theatres that had connected actors
and audiences. Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (1959–63) was an excep-
tion. Ralph Rapson, the architect, kept the interior spaces animated yet
intimate with irregular acoustical ‘clouds’ and a moveable stage closely
surrounded by small asymmetrical seating areas. The dynamic façade
with its cut-out screens heightened changing perceptions of light and
shadow, inside and out, surfaceand depth, all to convey the layers of
meanings in all performance.
The Las Vegas Strip.
The 1958 Stardust
Hotel and Casino with
neon sign by Kermit
Wayne of YESCO
(Young Electric Sign
Company) is on the
right (imploded in
2007) and the 1961 La
Concha Motel by Paul
R. Williams on the
left. Photograph 
c. 1975.
Eero Saarinen, TWA
Terminal, Idlewild
(now Kennedy)
Airport, Queens, 
New York, 1956–62,
interior of waiting
area.
1 8 6
The ‘baby boom’ generated thousands of new schools in suburbs and
small towns, mostly single-storey elementary schools that emphasized
‘day-lighting’ and flexibility. Educators wanted to help children focus
more effectively, while school boards tried to keep costs under control
and plan for expansion. A bare-bones facility for West Columbia, Texas,
completed in 1952 by the Houston architect Donald Barthelme, was
widely admired. A ‘roller-coaster’ entry canopy for buses enlivened the
inexpensive industrial materials, while ‘neighborhoods’ of classrooms
faced landscaped courtyards. When the Supreme Court’s momentous
1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, outlawed ‘separate but equal’
facilities, school districts in the seventeen Southern states continued to
build segregated facilities. Paul Rudolph’s Sarasota High School (1959) is
one such example. Its gravity-defying concrete screens, stairs and canti-
levers dramatize teenage social life while shielding classrooms from the
sun – and from black classmates.44 Formal brilliance can sometimes
short-circuit social change.
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum,
New York, 1943–59,
interior view from
upper galleries to
base of the ramp.
1 8 8
Several firms now specialized in educational facilities, notably John
Lyon Reid in northern California and Caudill Rowlett Scott in Bryan,
Texas, and Oklahoma City. Caudill’s 1941 pamphlet, ‘Space for Teaching’,
now became a major influence on modern schools. Committed to research
and teamwork, crs developed ingenious devices to control the elements
and reduce costs, as well as planning strategies for better learning. Schools
Construction Systems Development (scsd) focused on packing all
mechanical equipment into a roof system. The Ford Foundation’s
Educational Facilities Laboratory (efl) sought to centralize and distill
many such innovations.
A 1947 Presidential Commission report had declared mass higher
education a national mission as returning gi students dramatically
increased enrolments at major research universities and small liberal-
arts colleges. The University of Miami, hailed internationally as the first
modern university, completed its first buildings in 1948–9, based on
wartime designs by Marion Manley with credit shared by her post-war
associate, Robert Law Weed. Critics praised the flexibility, informality
and climatic adaptations, and the daring engineering of rigid bents and
cantilevers – using timber salvaged from military installations. In a sim-
ilar vein Henry Klumb built nineteen magnificent tropical-modern
buildings for the University of Puerto Rico between 1946 and 1966, draw-
ing in part on his work with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Yale University President A. Whitney Griswold commissioned a wide
range of expensive, daring modern buildings, beginning a trend that
Ralph Rapson,
Guthrie Theater,
Minneapolis,
Minnesota, 1959–63,
demolished 2006.
1 8 9 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
continues into this century. Architects fostered ‘identity’ and ‘commu-
nity’ with distinctive shapes and textured finishes, the most visible and
notorious being the rough-textured Brutalism of Paul Rudolph’s School
of Art and Architecture (1958–64). By 1963 Richard Dober’s Campus
Planning had distilled a ‘scientific’ approach to the ‘multiversity’ based on
‘modules’ for continuous growth softened by greenery – two fundamen-
tal principles of American college campuses since Colonial times.
Expansive modern dormitories were imperative for the expanded student
bodies, including apartments for married gis.
New kinds of educational institutions explored innovative environ-
ments for different kinds of learning. When som was selected from 260
applicants for the ‘future-oriented’ Air Force Academy in Colorado
Springs (1954–62), the design overcame Congressional resistance by
placing a thin classical veneer of limestone over disciplined industrial
Modernism – using computers to analyse the structural loads. Ernest
Kump’s Foothill College (1957–60) in Los Altos Hills, California, provided
a model for community colleges with 44 modular pavilions knit together
by a informal site plan and wide overhangs that sheltered circuitous
pathways. Edward Larrabee Barnes’s 1961 Haystack Mountain School at
Deer Isle, Maine, embraced nature with its bold roof lines on intercon-
nected pavilions covered in cedar shingles. At the other end of the
spectrum, major foundations raised funds for advanced research and
conference centres in the social sciences at Princeton and Stanford.
Despite similar dates and programmes, each was visibly distinctive.
If post-war intellectual life was deeply secular, the larger culture
experienced a religious revival. Liberal congregations derived spiritual
inspiration from abstract forms and dramatic incarnations of space and
light – qualities the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich characterized as
1 9 0
Donald Barthelme,
West Columbia
Elementary School,
West Columbia,
Texas, 1951–2, bus/car
entry. 
‘holy emptiness’ and ‘majestic simplicity’.45 Three ‘gathered churches’
built between 1948 and 1951, when wartime restrictions remained in effect,
mark a first stage of this shift: Eliel Saarinen’s spare Lutheran Christ
Church in Minneapolis; Pietro Belluschi’s numinous wood-frame First
Presbyterian Church in the lumber town of Cottage Grove, Oregon; and
Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, California, with panes
of glass set in delicate redwood arches inviting communion with the sea
and woodlands. Peter Blake’s An American Synagogue for Today and
Tomorrow (1954) dismissed ‘meshugothic’ historical styles and praised
modern synagogues by Percival Goodman, Harrison & Abramowitz,
Erich Mendelsohn, Philip Johnson – and the ever-present Frank Lloyd
Wright, whose Beth Shalom (1953–9) in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins
Park has crystalline walls of lustrous corrugated fibreglass.
The scale and visual drama of religious architecture soon escalated.
Marcel Breuer’s first buildings (1954–61) for St John’s Abbey and
University in Collegetown, Minnesota, highlighted mammoth concrete
plates, folded or honeycombed, and a massive trapezoidal bell-tower.
Another kind of mega-church now emerged in the suburbs, epitomized
by Neutra’s Community Church (1962) in Garden Grove, California, for
the evangelist Robert Schuller. Its fan-shaped area for 1,400 cars gives
drive-in and walk-in worshippers alike a view of the nave. Schuller’s suc-
cess led him to collaborate with Philip Johnson on the nearby Crystal
1 9 1 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Marion Manley and
Robert Law Weed,
University of Miami,
Miami, Florida,
1948–9.
Cathedral, completed in 1980, calling it a ‘22-acre shopping center for
Jesus Christ’.46
By the end of the 1950s, more architects and critics were breaking out
of strait-laced propriety. Progressive Architecture endorsed plasticity and
‘emotional and sensual delight’ in 1958; a 1961 series lauded the benefits
of ‘chaoticism’.47 Most of the nation came to realize the limits of post-war
promises as people confronted the entrenched problems of racism and
poverty throughout the country, especially the deplorable condition of
cities. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’s riveting
assault on the destructive realities of urban renewal, became a best-seller
in 1961; a year later came Michael Harrington’s The Other America:
Poverty in the United States and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an attack
on chemical pollution. The shock of John F. Kennedy’s assassinationin
1963 affected the country deeply. The first large-scale urban riots broke
out in Harlem and Los Angeles. Martin Luther King’s March on
Washington culminated with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech – then his own
assassination in Memphis. Modern architecture joined the ranks of
Richard Neutra,
Community Church,
Garden Grove,
California, 1962, 
view from interior
and pulpit out to
parking lot.
1 9 2
social reform once again, this time offering incremental improvements
rather than redemption through master plans.
In such circumstances, the slick, futuristic architecture of the 1964
World’s Fair in New York did not seem worth its unprecedented cost,
over a billion dollars. Robert Moses’ elaborately orchestrated control
now appeared heavy-handed. Professional and popular magazines
savaged the New York Pavilion by Philip Johnson, the gigantic ibm logo-
building by Saarinen with Charles Eames, and the House of Good Taste
(in fact a pluralistic choice of Modern, Contemporary and Traditional
houses along with an Underground Home). Two very different authors
commented indirectly on choices. Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’
evoked the emerging realm of pleasure and theatricality, unconcerned
about moral or aesthetic judgements. These very attitudes led the archi-
tecture critic Peter Blake to blast contemporary American culture and its
landscapes as God’s Own Junkyard. In any case, to paraphrase Bob Dylan,
the times they were a-changin’ – and so was architecture.
1 9 3 T h e Tr i u m p h o f M o d e r n i s m , 1 9 4 6 – 1 9 6 4
Sandy & Babcock
(Diana Crawford, 
project architect), 
for the UDC, University
Park Apartments,
Ithaca, New York, 1973.
Modernists typically strive for radical alternatives to accepted norms.
This certainly happened with the myriad attacks on the Establishment
of the 1960s and ’70s – including assaults on Modernism itself. The early
years of hope saw violent protests in American cities, yet it still seemed
possible to make the world a better place.1 Youth culture confronted the
nation with the exuberance of drugs and rock ’n’ roll, the anger of anti-
war and civil-rights protests. Young architects, sometimes still at college,
affected the profession as never before, united in resistance to conven-
tional curricula and clients, intrigued by emergent lifestyles – a key
neologism of the era. Seizing the gerundive to signal continuous pro-
cesses, they were ‘doing architecture’ in multiple unprecedented ways:
free-form hippie communes; advocacy groups committed to helping the
poor; environmentalist experiments; lighthearted, camp playfulness;
fantastical megastructures; proudly unbuilt ‘paper’ or ‘cardboard archi-
tecture’ based on complex theoretical systems.2
Modern architects of all ages turned to historical precedents, seeking to
ground their designs in scholarly knowledge – or at least intuitive associ-
ations. moma in New York helped launch this voyage. Architecture without
Architects, Bernard Rudofsky’s popular 1964 book and exhibition, cele-
brated the vernacular housing of Mediterranean and African villages,
hoping to re-energize Modernism with visual proof that standardized
forms could sustain meaningful communities. This romanticized univer-
sal vernacular ignored cultural variations and historical change in favour
of ‘timeless’ roots. Drawn to the appealing imagery, architects eagerly
incorporated similar ‘precedents’ or ‘justifications’, at least in presenta-
tions, especially for housing. moma then published Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi’s ‘Gentle Manifesto’ of 1966.
‘I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning’, explained
Venturi. ‘I prefer “both-and” to “either-or” . . . the difficult unity of inclu-
sion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.’3 The book’s rich and erudite
historical archive was chosen for visual impact. Italian Mannerist distor-
tions predominated, but American examples held their own, from
c h a p t e r s i x
Challenging Orthodoxies,
1965–1984
Thomas Jefferson to Main Street – judged ‘almost all right’ on the last
page.
When Peter Eisenman founded the Institute for Architecture and
Urban Studies in New York in 1967, he, too, looked to history, uniting a
formalist fraternity around the legacy of European avant-gardes from
the 1920s and ’30s with no regard for political affiliations. The Institute
then launched an exploration of longue durée typologies based on
Italian neo-rationalist theories about abstract essences that provide the
ur-roots of cultures. ‘Theory’ emerged, trans-coding or borrowing
ideas from rarefied historical, literary and philosophical sources. The
Institute’s journal Oppositions, published from 1973 to 1984, proclaimed
theory a ‘critical agent’ of destabilization, revealing the alienation of
human subjects, the virtuality of objects. Its dissent focused solely on a
hermetic architectural world.
Language, often baffling, was crucial to this and other tendencies. The
New York Five (Eisenman, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Michael
Graves and John Hejduk) emerged with a 1969 conference and exhibition
at moma, followed by a 1972 book, Five Architects, with Judith Turner’s ele-
gantly abstract photographs of details in their houses. They also marketed
themselves as the Whites, signifying a shared penchant for texts and white
villas or, more precisely, axonometric drawings of such villas, a representa-
tional technique that looked back to Le Corbusier’s interlocking planes of
the 1920s. Drawings became an ideal – architectural expression uncompro-
mised by clients or construction – and a new commodity sold in galleries.
University Park
Apartments, Ithaca,
site plan. 
1 9 6
The group that came to be
known as the Grays never coa-
lesced as a collective entity with a
manifesto. The name signalled a
counterpoint to the Whites and a
shared interest in ambiguous
allusions. Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott Brown, Charles Moore,
Robert Stern and Romaldo
Giurgula received the most atten-
tion, but many fellow-travellers
were likewise intrigued by the
nuances of everyday speech, the
power of familiar narratives, the
richness of architectural history
and the brash honky-tonk world
of popular culture. Questioning
‘orthodox modern architecture’
without discarding it, eschewing
visionary utopias, the Grays
wanted to re-enchant the world.
They celebrated the modernity
that already existed, especially in
cities. Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown argued that the commer-
cial strip of Las Vegas was
analogous to the Roman piazza,
so architects should try to under-
stand and ‘enhance’ it. Moore
described his quest for ‘strange and revolutionary and mind-boggling and
often uncomfortable [possibilities] but only using the ordinary pieces’.4
Other forms of culture were also dissolving boundaries. Architects
linked up with friends in the visual arts, theatre, dance and performance
art who shared their euphoric, multi-sensory quest. The composer John
Cage was a hero to young designers who sought an ‘open-ended’ explo-
ration of possibilities, while Ann and Lawrence Halprin taught them
to think of space in terms of improvised choreographies. Marshall
McLuhan was admired for his vision of media-based ‘allatonceness’.
Environments were key to ‘happenings’, earthworks and site-specific
sculpture. Young designers created ephemeral sets for avant-garde 
theatre performances and special-effects ‘total environments’ for explo-
sive rock-music concerts at discos, clubs and coliseum performances.
Peter Eisenman, House
VI, West Cornwall,
Connecticut, 1972–6,
axonometric drawings. 
1 9 7 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Numerous public forums took up these issues. Ada Louise Huxtable
became the first architecture critic for the New York Times in 1963,
defending and expanding the scope of Modernism while engaging in
valid critiques. Other newspapers and magazines would follow, renew-
ing the role of the public intellectual that Lewis Mumford and Herbert
Croly had playedearlier in the century. A surge of books and scores of
‘little magazines’ appeared around the country, most espousing cultural
breadth and social relevance. Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture in New
York, Design Book Review in San Francisco, Oz from the University of
Kansas School of Architecture and other now defunct journals explored
the intricacies of real and imaginary worlds.
Historic preservation briefly united all the factions. Modern archi-
tects protested unsuccessfully against the demolition of McKim, Mead
& White’s magnificent Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan in 1963.
Giorgio Cavaglieri (who purportedly invented the term ‘adaptive reuse’
for his sensitive, visibly modern alterations) led the campaign to create
New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, empowered to
save other monuments from ruthless real-estate development. The 1966
National Preservation Act quietly signalled a momentous cultural shift.
Whereas Americans had previously defined themselves as forward-
looking, this act contended that the ‘spirit and direction of the Nation
are founded upon and reflected in its historic heritage.’5
Architects also took an active role in the political activism unleashed
in the late 1960s. Preservation took a different form in efforts to protect
and improve impoverished inner-city neighbourhoods, inverting urban
Mothers of Invention
concert with the
Joshua Light Show at
the Mineola Theater,
Long Island, New
York, 1967. 
1 9 8
renewal’s efforts to eradicate them. The path-breaking 1965–6 legislation
of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society provided funds for housing, health-
care facilities, schools and other community buildings in low-income
neighbourhoods. Harlem, Brooklyn and Pittsburgh initiated the first
community design centres (cdcs), followed by some 2,000 others. Paul
Davidoff coined the term advocacy to describe this embryonic move-
ment of students and dissident professionals who worked directly with
neighbourhood groups.6
Some young architects joined the counter-culture, hoping to under-
mine conventional American homes, family life and professional
practice by withdrawing from the mainstream. They favoured ephemer-
al structures that sat lightly on the earth. Ant Farm, a radical collective
based in San Francisco and then in Austin, Texas, mixed the freedoms of
‘nomadology’ and nudity with didactic agitprop performances. Huge
inflatable pvc ‘air pillows’ sounded the alarm about dangers like air
pollution. Hippie communes were fond of geodesic domes, seen as
metaphors of cosmic and ecological harmony. Drop City, Colorado,
founded in 1965, adopted Steve Baer’s ‘Zomes’, exploded rhomboid
dodecahedral domes fabricated from salvaged materials, principally
junked car tops, then equipped with high-tech solar collectors and wind
turbines. These and other alternative practices were media-savvy about
maintaining networks and astutely marketing spontaneous events. The
1970 special issue of Progressive Architecture, ‘Advertisements for a Counter
Culture’, described the importance of new technologies – a biosphere,
domes, pneumatics, media and computers – in the transformative world
of ‘radical discontent and innovation’.7
Ant Farm, Clean Air
Pod, pneumatic
installation and 
Earth Day ‘event’ 
at Sproul Plaza,
University of
California at
Berkeley, 1970.
1 9 9 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Some of the most significant experiments of the era concerned the
environment. Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) and Reyner
Banham’s urban parable Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
(1971) emphasized the power and potential dangers of another history,
natural history, warning architects against hubris. The first Earth Day
in 1970 fused biomorphic shapes, advanced technologies and public
participation. James Wines and Alison Sky founded Sculpture in the
Environment (site) that year, recasting architecture as public art that
criticized modernist disregard for environments. Their ‘de-architecture’
installations revealed inevitable processes of change and decay. Best
known are the eight showrooms for best Products, a profitable mail-
order merchandiser. These include the crumbling Indeterminate Façade
in Houston (1975), the Rainforest Showroom in Hialeah, Florida (1979)
and the Forest Building in Richmond, Virginia (1980), where trees on
the suburban site seem to have taken their revenge on the banal ‘big box’
structure.
Paolo Soleri’s ‘arcology’ – architecture respectful of ecology – was an
apocalyptic vision of gigantic mixed-use structures that preserved vast
surrounding landscapes. These dense urban environments, some to be
a mile high and housing 500,000 people, would reduce pollution and
prevent sprawl. A 1970 book and coast-to-coast museum exhibitions of
exquisite Plexiglas models won converts to the cause.8 Soleri began the
first prototype town, Arcosanti, in 1971 in the Arizona desert near
Taliesin, where he had been apprenticed with Wright in the 1940s. The
construction, still ongoing, is mostly hand-crafted by volunteers. The
SITE, Forest Building
for BEST, Richmond,
Virginia, 1980. 
2 0 0
opec oil embargo of 1973 helped spur the diffuse, but more down-to-
earth Alternative Technology movement, which experimented with
hybridized strategies like solar panels and earth-sheltered houses.
The dizzying simultaneity of the era sustained multiple groups and
experimental perspectives, all passionate if quixotic. A 1971 cover story
on ‘New Architecture’ in Newsweek featured Louis Kahn and Paul
Rudolph alongside Arcosanti and Drop City – but not the New York
Five.9 The space programme, Moog synthesizers, Mod fashion trends,
computer graphics and television blurred categories like ‘radical’ or
‘Establishment’. Indeed, government agencies appropriated domes,
pneumatics and sophisticated multimedia for spectacles like world’s
fairs, notably Fuller’s immense geodesic dome at Expo ’67 in Montreal.
When postmodernism came into American architecture in the mid-
1970s, it failed to engage most of these permutations.10 Charles Jencks
translated the term from literary criticism with The Language of Post-
Modern Architecture (1977), emphasizing ‘multivalent’ meanings,
metaphors and syntax. In codifying the new trend he proposed an elabo-
rate stylistic genealogy. Jencks also suggested a lighthearted approach
and inferred that Modernism was a puritanical restriction on postmod-
ernism’s visual liberation. But Modernism had changed as well, of course.
Recognizing that it was no longer possible to transform the world
through design, many modern architects withdrew into their own eso-
teric games and brandished the idea of autonomy from the larger culture.
The shift fit a national mood that Vernon Jordan, President of the Urban
League, called ‘antisocial negativism’.11
Modern architecture had indeed fallen from grace, and for many rea-
sons. Radicals lambasted its close connections with the destructive forces
of modernization, capitalism and the Vietnam War, while conservatives
denounced the fundamental belief that it could remedy social problems.
Architects responded to the fracas in myriad ways, but only two received
extensive media attention, making them seem the only options. The
wide-ranging eclecticism that rejoiced in symbolic allusions, personal
experience and historical continuities was what came to be called post-
modernism. In the opposite corner of the ring, post-structuralist critics
of the profession demanded intellectual rigour and ‘autonomy’.12
Whatever their bent, most architects of the late 1970s retreated to issues
of style – and discourse. ‘Today’s architects do not just build; they com-
ment’, noted Ada Louise Huxtable in 1980.13 The discussion usually
ignored the emergent post-industrial, ‘post-Fordist’ service economy,
despite a major recession that cost jobs and unsettled lives, including
those of many designers. Factions instead turned against each other in an
impassioned religious war, ignoring their shared if contentiousbeliefs.
2 0 1 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Retrofitting the Corporate Workplace
The sleek glass-box office buildings of the 1950s exploded in the late
1960s, an aesthetic detonation set off by an aggressive global economy.
Corporations had to keep expanding their operations and dominate over
competitors to succeed in this high-risk world. The same held for philan-
thropic organizations and governmental bureaucracies. Almost half of the
nation’s workers were ‘service sector’ employees in large offices. American
ceos wanted to oversee every aspect of their workforces, often making
compliance the basis for advancement, even when the methods were coop-
erative.14 American and European office buildings diverged in the 1970s,
one geared principally to economic growth and control over employees,
the other to environmental innovations and employee well-being.
The atrium lobby captured the new entrepreneurial spirit in the usa.
These tightly guarded jewel boxes of corporate strength accentuated
central power. Atriums also redefined urban ‘public space’, much of
which now came indoors under private auspices. The earliest and most
positive example was the Ford Foundation headquarters designed by
Roche & Dinkeloo and completed in 1967. Officials for this ambitious
international philanthropy wanted an inspiring work environment for
their staff and an uplifting public presence in New York. Municipal zon-
ing laws passed in 1961 had called for a plaza open to the public, so the
indoor garden required a variance or waiver. The court, just 0.1 hectare,
seemed immense, terracing down from 42nd to 43rd Streets and rising
to a skylight. The structure was almost perfectly square, the offices
arranged in an ‘L’ to look out onto and across the luxuriant garden. A
grid of Cor-Ten steel encased glass doors and windows in a 1.8-metre
module (0.6 metres larger than the standard size), which amplified the
sense of spaciousness and collective purpose. Passers-by shared some of
these pleasures, enjoying a sun-dappled marvel during the day and a
luminous beacon at night.
Peachtree Center, a multi-block mixed-use development (mxd) com-
plex in Atlanta, Georgia (dubbed Rockefeller Center South by local
boosters), also opened in 1967. John Portman placed an immense gilded
atrium at the core of this high-tech citadel. There is unmistakable energy
in the 21-storey lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, ‘like Bernini on an
acid trip’.15 The restless negative space pulsates with illuminated water-
falls, glass-capsule elevators and bowered terraces of rooms rising above
awe-struck spectators. Peachtree Center was ideal for the tens of thou-
sands of newcomers to Atlanta each year, eager for an urbanity that
provided the order of suburbia, what upbeat books on the city specified
as ‘only . . . the beautiful, never the ugly or depressing’.16 Its popularity
2 0 2
Kevin Roche, Ford
Foundation, New York
City, 1966–7, atrium.
Ford Foundation, 
section. 
spurred an expanded complex of some twenty buildings within a decade,
all interconnected by sky bridges, hermetic and controlled – an instant
and artificial city.
Portman had flouted aia conventions by combining the roles of
architect and developer. He first insisted this gave him freedom as a
designer. His 1976 manifesto, The Architect as Developer, audaciously
claimed an even higher purpose: he could save declining downtowns by
assembling land and capital for large-scale complexes to attract lots of
people. The aia soon concurred and elected him a Fellow. The Hyatt
hotel chain launched a boom in glitzy downtown establishments, and
Portman was invited to build ‘power architecture’ in cities from San
Francisco to Shanghai, each with a grandiose atrium. The most colossal
offspring was the Renaissance Center in Detroit (1973–8), a vast riverside
complex in mirrored glass fortified by concrete ramparts and raised on
a plinth. Portman opened the way for today’s savvy architect-developers,
who recognize that architecture begins with the design of financing and
property. Another legacy is more unsettling. His Modernism created two
architectural and urban realms, one inside and carefully packaged, the
other outside and left to decline.
Office-building in the 1970s celebrated bold, imposing façades. A 1979
moma exhibition, Transformations in Modern Architecture, curated by
Arthur Drexler, observed that now ‘the object is to conceal rather than
reveal.’17 Brutalism was the inauspicious term for blank concrete sur-
faces, a reference to Le Corbusier’s rough-textured sculptural concrete,
béton brut. Corporate ceos, still fearful of urban riots, felt assured by the
fortress-like solidity of heavy walls with exaggerated roofs and parapets.
Windows took unusual forms like slits or portholes, often configured
in irregular patterns. Corporations vied for attention with the
mastodontic cylindrical corners of Kevin Roche’s Knights of Columbus
headquarters in New Haven (1970), William Pereira’s pyramidal
Transamerica Building in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center (1972),
and Hugh Stubbins’s Citicorp Building in New York (1977), the last’s
sharp-angled crown seemingly cut by a knife. Virtuoso structures 
rotated, gyrated and turned askew with frantic gestures that quickly
became clichés.
Mirrored glass was another favourite ‘skin’, a distinctly American fad
using inexpensive materials to create the appearance of glamour. Cesar
Pelli’s bulging Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles (locals call it the
Blue Whale) inaugurated mullion-less ‘shaped glass’ in the years
1970–75. Colin Rowe’s and Robert Slutzky’s article ‘Transparency: Literal
and Phenomenal (Part 2)’, written in 1955–6 but published only in 1971,
undermined simple arguments in favour of transparent glass, providing
2 0 4
an intellectual pedigree for more opaque façades. Most architects simply
enjoyed the amalgam of calculations and accidents of light. Some
argued that large glass buildings were rendered invisible because they
reflected the sky. No one bought the sell. Films like The Towering Inferno
and Earthquake (both 1975) sensationalized legitimate fears about civic
disasters with shards of glass raining terror on pedestrians. One local
catastrophe delayed the opening of the John Hancock Tower in Boston
(1971–6), designed by Henry Cobb for I. M. Pei, when the large windows
were mysteriously sucked out of their frames, crashing down on Copley
Square. (Pressure differentials with the double-paned windows seem to
have caused the problem.) The energy crisis gave impetus to tinted or
reflective glass, but workers in neighbouring buildings complained that
mirrored surfaces caused severe glare, heat gain and disorientation.
Drexler dryly acknowledged that the trend ‘conveys an indifference to
human presence most people interpret as hostile’.18
Philip Johnson returned to the limelight with such a building, trading
his early International-Style rigour for an eclectic, ‘less boring’ redefi-
nition of Modernism. He formed a partnership with John Burgee to design
the ids Center in Minneapolis, headquarters for a large financial-services
firm, completed in 1972. The original programme of a glass tower became
four prismatic buildings of different heights and diverse uses, filling a
downtown block. Dizzying zigzag shapes (Johnson called them ‘zogs’)
made of thousands of small re-entrant angles enlivened the façades. The
centrifugal focus is a multi-tiered space frame with skyway links to sur-
rounding buildings. Below is a giant retail complex called the Crystal
Court, open to the street on all sides, but still resolutely private space.
Texas soon beckoned with a series of grandiose corporate and cultural
commissions for Johnson. Pennzoil Place (1976) became an instant icon
for Houston’s new petroleum-based wealth, its two skewed trapezoidal
towers of ominously dark glass rising alongside a 3-metre slit. The
impresario-developer Gerald Hines found that ‘extra quality in build-
ings would make our productstand out [for] a better class of client’,
clients willing to pay between $3 and $4 per square metre more than the
going rate, even in a depressed market.19 Pennzoil was part of a city-
within-a-city that expanded earlier concourse networks. Richard
Ingersoll has predicted that the ‘fifth largest city in the United States [i.e.
Houston] will someday be famous among urbanologists as the first
modern city without streets’ since there are only elevated freeways and
tunnels which connect over 50 downtown buildings extending for a total
of seven kilometers.20
Height remained a premium in this economic climate. Sears,
Roebuck, and Company commissioned som to design Chicago’s Sears
2 0 5 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Johnson/Burgee, IDS
Center, Minneapolis,
1969–72, Crystal
Court.
Tower. With 110 floors it held the title of the world’s tallest building from
its completion in 1974 until 1997. Construction technology could still
generate a dramatic public presence. The som partners Bruce Graham
and Fazlur Khan (a structural engineer) developed a system they called
‘bundled tubes’ that tied together nine glass skyscrapers of different
heights into one building with interlocked exterior tubing for lateral
wind loads. The moma curator Drexler classified this under the rubric of
‘cages’, seemingly oblivious to the parallel with Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’
of capitalist bureaucracy.
Most New Yorkers resented the gargantuan size of the World Trade
Center, which would only achieve iconic status with its tragic destruction
in 2001. Conceived in 1960 in an effort to bring international businesses
2 0 6
Paul Rudolph,
Burroughs/Wellcome
Headquarters,
Research Triangle
Park, North Carolina,
1970–72.
to Manhattan’s flagging financial district, the wtc signalled the power of
the emerging global economy. Construction took a decade, 1966–76. The
site encompassed 65 hectares and more than 930,000 square metres of
office space. Excavation for the foundations would provide the landfill
to build Battery Park City. All this was too much for an architect like
Minoru Yamasaki with no experience in skyscraper design, so Emery
Roth was brought in as an associate. Yamasaki transformed the modern
glass skyscraper into two towers with a historicist façade of inverted
Venetian Gothic arches at their base, shown on a 1963 Time cover. But
hubris was the major complaint. ‘The World’s Tallest Fiasco’, opined The
Nation. ‘The ultimate Disneylandfairytaleblockbuster’, declared Ada
Louise Huxtable. ‘It is General Motors Gothic.’21
Meanwhile, the rise of the Sunbelt intensified the fiscal crisis for the
north-eastern Snowbelt and Midwestern Rustbelt cities like Detroit.
Air-conditioned urban skyscrapers seemed oblivious to the environ-
ment as well as the street, but sites were important in some suburban
headquarters. The stacked, lozenge-shaped boxes of Paul Rudolph’s
Burroughs-Wellcome Pharmaceutical Company in North Carolina’s
Research Triangle (1970–72) echo the topography of the surrounding
ridge, while the rhythmic play of light and views in the multifaceted
interiors indeed suggests a flexible ‘living organism’. Emilio Ambasz’s
Research Laboratories for the Schlumberger Oil Company near Austin,
Texas (1982), used earth berms to integrate the structures into the land,
distributing them through an arcadian landscape. Environmentally
inflected Modernism was even more resonant in California and the
Pacific North-west. One example is the Weyerhaeuser Headquarters
2 0 7 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
(1969–71), designed by som’s San Francisco office, with sod roofs and
stepped layers nestled in a rural valley in Washington State.
The strong pro-business mood of the late 1970s generated complaints
about limitations on capital formation. The ‘big bang’ of deregulation
and a new tax bill in 1978 converted the welfare state into a corporate-
welfare state. President Jimmy Carter embraced ‘public–private
partnerships’, hoping that private enterprise could solve public problems
if given proper incentives. Desperate to keep large corporations, muni-
cipal governments kowtowed to demands for lucrative investment
opportunities. Lax lending requirements and generous tax benefits
spurred new commercial real estate, despite the glut of office space in every
large city and the dire need for housing.
‘Prestige’ projects with opulent lobbies and crowns were especially
popular. At once prescient and perverse, Philip Johnson turned from
bold geometries to historicism. He was shown clutching a model of New
York’s att Building (1979–83), with its notorious Chippendale crown, on
a 1979 cover of Time. Postmodernism, begun as a critique, had become
a facetious game of quotations and pastiche by ‘architectural monar-
chists’, an expression of ‘social and political neo-conservatism’.22 The
vital issue was much larger than nonchalant historicist games, but too
many architects seemed oblivious to anything but stylistic controversies
and developers’ enticements, ignoring the devastation of the late 1970’s
crisis in American cities.
New technologies analysed certain kinds of problems. The ‘Systems
Approach’, invoked repeatedly, used game-theory models to compare
various building systems while ‘fast-track’ construction borrowed
‘pre-programming’ from the aerospace industry. These technocratic
methods made it difficult for architects to modify schemes. A few archi-
tecture offices took up computer-assisted design (cad), ranging from
Beverly Willis’s small firm in San Francisco to som’s several corporate
offices. The University of California at Berkeley installed its Urban
Simulation Laboratories, while Carnegie-Mellon and mit’s Architecture
Machine Group (precursor to today’s Media Lab) experimented with
design technologies that envisioned new kinds of creativity based on
algorithms.23
State-sponsored workplaces put enormous demands on architects
with bureaucratic red tape, budgetary strictures and shifting concepts of
public welfare. Richard Meier’s Bronx Developmental Center is a
poignant case in point. The New York State Department of Mental
Hygiene commissioned a total-care residential service for 750 mentally
and physically disabled children in 1970. The site was forlorn, a dismal
industrial tract surrounded by highways and railroad tracks. By the time
2 0 8
of the building’s completion in 1977, the location and the design caused
an uproar. Patient advocates and many psychiatrists attacked Meier’s
cloistered plan as an ‘obsolete’ concept and the shiny aluminium panels
as ‘inhumane’, while colleagues praised his elegant composition and his
sincere efforts to accommodate the children.24 The controversy high-
lights both the faddishness of ‘flexible’ late 1960s modules and the
significance of cultural shifts outside architecture. Psychiatric treatment
had undergone an about-face during the 1970s: the early model of large-
scale respites from the world had swung 180 degrees to one of community
mental health integrated into neighbourhoods. Committed to the first
set of premises and frustrated by a cumbersome process, Meier had not
adapted to the shift, nor could his building. The complex was soon
abandoned and partially demolished.
Home Again, Home Again
The words housing, home and shelter resonated everywhere in the late
1960s and ’70s. The women’s movement contested conventional notions
of home and family. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)
attacked suburbia as a ‘comfortable concentration camp’. The ‘typical
household’ went from 70 per cent of the population in the 1950s to 15 per
cent by 1980. More than half the country’s married women worked out-
side the home by 1970, including those with young children. The divorce
rate doubled and the birth rate declined. The exhilaration of women’s
liberation had its dark side in the feminization of poverty with the mas-
sive increase in female-headed households. All these demographic and
Richard Meier, Bronx
Developmental
Center,New York,
1970–77.
2 0 9 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
cultural upheavals affected the realities of domestic architecture,
although the changes were far from profound.
Developers, officials and architects saw new markets in the shift.
Unmarried couples, single parents and single people of all ages wanted
the comforts of home together with services like childcare and leisure
activities. Nearly 23 million new dwelling units were built between 1963
and 1973, more than in any previous decade. Multi-family housing
accounted for over half the new production until 1976, spurred in part
by condominium ownership, made legal in all states in 1968. While some
planned communities sought diverse residents, most were special-
purpose enclaves for young single people (many refused children) or
retirement villages for the elderly. Economics favoured relatively smooth
and unornamented façades with strong, geometrical roofs, usually
sharply angled shed roofs or barrel vaults. Four terms reverberated
through the discussions – ‘user needs’, ‘community’, ‘site’ and ‘identity’ –
all of which straddled modern innovations and familiar prototypes.
Robert Venturi’s Guild House (1960–63) in Philadelphia announced
the new sensibility. Sponsored by the Friends Neighborhood Guild, the
building provided 91 apartments for elderly men and women who wanted
to remain in a rundown area undergoing urban renewal. Venturi
respected that desire for continuity with a neighbourhood and the con-
cept of home. The six-storey structure engaged the street with slightly
over-scaled, but unabashedly ‘conventional’ materials: brick walls, dou-
ble-hung windows and the first self-conscious use of chain-link fencing.
A large Roman arch at the top marked the residents’ social area, even as
it alluded to Palladio and Louis Kahn for the cognoscenti. The glazed-
brick entry featured a sign in gilded block letters, a Pop Art allusion to a
Venturi & Rauch with
Cope and Lippincott,
Guild House,
Philadelphia,
1960–63.
2 1 0
2 1 1 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
marquee or billboard. The gold-anodized ‘tv antenna’ on the roof was
a sculpture, a signifier, for which the architects contributed most of the
cost. More important but rarely discussed, the light-filled rooms and
hallways were pleasant places and easy to comprehend. While Venturi is
credited with the design, he was strongly influenced by Denise Scott
Brown, who became his wife and design partner in 1967. Simultaneously
provocative and proverbial, dissonant and calming, the pair asked that
we see buildings from multiple perspectives.
Subsidized housing (including Guild House) remained well below 5
per cent of the American total, compared with more than half in Britain
or on the Continent. President Johnson created hud in 1965, a Cabinet-
level agency for housing and urban development with a heroic new
building by Marcel Breuer. hud announced two principal goals: to coor-
dinate all below-market-rate (bmr) construction and to stimulate the
private home-building industry. Bent on decentralizing, grants favoured
Sunbelt cities like Dallas and Phoenix. Prefabrication systems seemed a
sure way to boost production while reducing costs. After all, one third
of new single-family dwellings were now mobile homes, which Paul
Rudolph heralded as ‘the 20th-century brick’ that could be stacked
sky-high.25 George Romney, Richard Nixon’s hud Secretary, launched
Operation Breakthrough in 1969, pro-
viding generous subsidies for 22
consortiums of product engineers and
management teams. But Romney’s expe-
rience at gm was no longer viable, even
for the auto industry. The prototypes
were expensive, visually un-appealing
and riddled with graft. Such efforts to
promote industrialized systems only
fuelled suspicions about visibly modern
architecture.
Both the right and the left consid-
ered public housing truly emblematic
of profound problems in Modernism
and government.26 Even the presti-
gious Douglas Commission on Urban
Problems lamented the supposed neg-
ative effect of ‘Le Corbusier’s sky-
scrapers-in-a-park’ in 1968.27 Public
housing underwent significant changes
as Congress provided higher cost/unit
subsidies for elderly projects, resulting
John Sharratt for the
Emergency Tenants
Association, Villa
Victoria, Boston,
Massachusetts,
1969–82.
in well-designed towers such as San Francisco’s Woodside Gardens
(1968). New family housing favoured small infill garden apartments on
‘scattered’ or ‘vest-pocket’ sites. But the notorious super-blocks far out-
numbered either of these initiatives, and conditions worsened as
economic restructuring increased unemployment levels for urban black
males and strained family bonds. As the crisis deepened, hud gauged
rents to incomes and gave preference to those with no other options.
Local authorities subsequently went broke and froze maintenance budg-
ets at already inadequate levels. The modernist project was reduced to
‘the projects’: unemployed African-American single mothers on welfare
warehoused in dreary, dangerous towers and slabs.
Public housing, less than 2 per cent of the nation’s total housing
stock, became a looming presence in the national imagination.
Resentments and apocalyptic fears festered as Americans grew increas-
ingly apprehensive about the future of their cities. The urban designer
Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space (1972) used ‘scientific’ graphs to argue
that high-rise towers inevitably cause crime. The ‘Pruitt-Igoe Myth’
falsely contended that architects had once lavished awards on this now
infamous project. Its demolition became an easy target for pundits like
Charles Jencks, who proclaimed that ‘Modern Architecture died in St
Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m.’28 President Nixon declared
a moratorium on federal housing subsidies in 1973, using specious asso-
ciations like this without mentioning conservative opposition or
widespread agency scandals.
Innovative non-profit organizations partially offset the devolution
of responsibility from the federal government. A desire for modesty
favoured ‘urban vernaculars’. New York State’s Mitchell-Lama Housing
Program sponsored rental housing like Davis/Brody’s Riverbend in
Harlem (1964–7), a skilful levitation of row-house units complete with
individual ‘stoops’ as entries, varied massing, playgrounds and walkways
that are visible, pleasant and safe – a type the firm adapted elsewhere to
good effect. The Urban Development Corporation (udc) built 23 hand-
some projects from 1968 to 1975. Good site planning characterized both
low-rise enclaves and high-rise agglomerations, including thirteen
diverse interventions at Twin Parks in the Bronx. Kenneth Frampton of
iaus collaborated with Ted Lieberman of udc on Marcus Garvey Park
Village in Brooklyn, a minimalist medium-density scheme influenced by
Newman’s Defensible Space and displayed at moma in 1973.
Similar initiatives elsewhere also favoured low-rise, medium-density
modern housing with vernacular inflections, especially when tenants
participated in deliberations. The Boston architect John Sharratt’s Villa
Victoria was built in six phases over thirteen years (1969–82) with fund-
2 1 2
ing from multiple non-profit organizations. The 750 units were a ‘patch-
work quilt’ of new and restored row houses and apartment towers linked
by an animated plaza, a priority for the Puerto Rican residents in the
Emergency Tenants Association.29 Chloethiel Woodard Smith’s racially
integrated projects in Washington, dc, and St Louis combined historic
preservation, conventional wood-frame dwellings and ample public
services interconnected through landscaped pathways, although several
critics disdained her conspicuously familiar references as overly ‘cute’,
too much like the neighbourhoods they replaced.30
California explored wide-ranging alternatives. A resurgence of interest
in rural-housing reform led Sanford Hirshen to build or expand nineteen
migrant farm workers’ communities from1965 to 1975, experimenting
with inventive techniques such as folded-plate structures in treated paper.
Most new housing was intentionally more familiar. Now critical of earlier
urban-renewal projects, San Francisco built scores of block-sized varia-
tions on wood-frame, shed-roofed clusters with shared outdoor spaces in
the Western Addition. Rehabilitated Victorian-era housing was inter-
spersed among the new projects. But here as elsewhere, the supply of
subsidized dwellings lagged far behind the ever-growing need.
Market-rate housing often followed the best design strategies of
subsidized enclaves. Some apartment towers took dramatic shapes like
2 1 3 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Sanford Hirshen with
Sim van der Ryn,
housing for migrant
farmworkers, Indio,
California, 1965.
cylinders and interlocking geometries and colonnades, especially popu-
lar in the Sunbelt. A new generation of agile modernists burst on the
scene in Miami with the vibrant colours and playful shapes of
Arquitectonica. The Atlantis (1978–82) was featured in the opening
sequence of the television series Miami Vice, inaugurating a new form of
branding. New York’s Battery Park City Authority commissioned multi-
ple teams of private developers and notable architects for more than
6,000 ‘high-end’ apartment units. Cooper/Eckstut’s 1979 master plan for
the 37 hectares of downtown property broke conventions by making
public space a priority, even along the waterfront. The architecture was
stifled by guidelines that imposed an artificial diversity and ‘contextual’
references to Manhattan’s pre-World War Two past. Since Battery Park
2 1 4
Arquitectonica,
Atlantis Building,
Miami, 1978–82.
2 1 5 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
City was publicly owned and operated by the udc, millions of dollars in
surplus profits were set aside for low-income housing in other parts of
the city, monies that disappeared into Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s budget.
Good intentions easily go awry without vigilance.
Architect-developer teams tried to counter sprawl with ‘clusters’ of
attached ‘town-homes’ that updated the garden apartments of the 1920s
with imaginative site plans. The privately owned town of Reston,
Virginia, suggested an auspicious prototype for compact development
of large-scale ‘urbanized suburbs’. Federal New Towns included The
Woodlands outside Houston; Irvine, California; and two New-Towns-
in-Town, Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis and Roosevelt Island alongside
Manhattan. Architects evoked irregular ‘vernacular’ settlements, the
fine-grain patterns of European ‘carpet housing’, or brash obliques and
diagonals. In principle, cluster housing protected local ecologies,
although many such landscapes consisted of lawns, artificial lakes and
golf courses.
Environmentalist sympathies affected large-scale elite enclaves, three
of which stand out. Sea Ranch on the rugged northern California coast
epitomized the modern arcadian ideal of simple luxury in a wilderness
preserve. Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (mltw) completed the first
condominium group in 1965, nestled in an unprepossessing corner of
the 2,000-hectare meadow. They adapted the unadorned redwood
sheathing of local barns and sheds with varied roof lines that followed
the windswept crests of cypress trees and rocky promontories. The dis-
tinctive amalgam of sensuousness and rigour extended to the interior
spaces, and to countless replications on much smaller sites all over 
the country.
Antoine Predock explored similar principles for La Luz (1967–73), a
dense group of 100 luxury condominium units north of Albuquerque,
New Mexico, whose owners protect the surrounding 200 hectares of
bosque and mesa in a land trust. Solar heating and cooling were combined
with a time-tested local material, sun-dried adobe covered with mud-
coloured stucco, keeping the interiors a pleasant temperature year round
while ensuring acoustical privacy at close quarter. While Predock’s massing
inevitably evokes the region’s pueblo architecture, the plain, unadorned
surfaces are sculptural. The site plan creates what he calls ‘abstract land-
scapes’, a modern sensibility at once local and universal.31
The town of Seaside also fits into this category of modern site 
planning, even though modern architects typically revile Duany/ Plater-
Zyberk (dpz) and their picture-perfect, 32-hectare Florida town with its
neo-traditional dwellings and rigid design code. The core principle of
dpz’s master plan (1979–80) was familiar typologies related to the street,
Antoine Predock, 
La Luz, Albuquerque,
New Mexico, 1967–73.
La Luz, site plan.
but progressive commitments to environmental protection, public tran-
sit and public open space were equally important. Hoping to provide an
image of diverse experimentation, they invited modernists like Steven
Holl, who built a Hybrid Building. Even if the overall impression
remains monolingual, Andrés Duany’s messianic calls for expert design
and his declarations of war against the status quo had a distinctly modern
ring that helped launch a crusade.
Discussion about modern single-family houses has usually ignored
this larger context, although luxury dwellings are homes and market
commodities as well as architectural statements. Complex geometries
and dynamic sections literally broke out of the box, a striking contrast
to the economical simple volumes of market-rate housing. As the
prosperity and cultural freedoms of the 1960s stimulated architectural
experiments, inflation saw house values double. Rising income inequal-
ities in the narcissistic ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s brought increased costs
and cachet to designer houses.
The archetypal design of the era for architects, even those who hated
it, was Robert Venturi’s home for his mother, Vanna Venturi, in Chestnut
Hill, Pennsylvania, completed in 1964 and soon famous as the Mother’s
House. The design juxtaposed layers of walls, spaces and historical ref-
erences. A study in architectonic paradox – Venturi called it ‘complex
and simple’, ‘open and closed’, ‘big and little’ – the house manifested its
designer’s intelligence and practicality. He made awkwardness a virtue,
like the Italian Mannerists who purposefully sought to disrupt perfec-
tion. The façade, seemingly symmetrical, challenged first impressions
with elements that were subtly off-centre, disjointed and literally split.
This ‘almost symbolic image of a house’ emphasized ‘almost’ with stud-
ied ambiguities and pleasures.32 The plan skewed the placement of walls
and stairs, generating a complex, almost crowded interior that invited
imaginative musing. Venturi’s abstract concepts enhanced his apprecia-
tion of everyday realities.
Richard Meier’s Smith House, near Darien, Connecticut (1965–7),
used elementary geometries in a more abstract manner. The wood
cladding was painted white, a sculptural object in a magnificent land-
scape. Expansive glass on the main façade overlooked a rocky coast.
Stairs and balconies created overlapping cubist spaces, inside and out.
Peter Eisenman’s numbered series of ‘post-humanist’ houses used elab-
orate mathematical codes to determine the overlaid planes, but surely
he enjoyed and to some extent calculated disruptive gestures like a
column through the dining table or the bed in House vi. A book by
his client Suzanne Frank described the ‘annoyances’, ‘inconvenient ele-
ments’ and ‘compromises’ she and her husband confronted. In 1974 the
2 1 7 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Venturi & Short,
Vanna Venturi House,
Chestnut Hill,
Pennsylvania,
1959–64, main
façade. 
Vanna Venturi House,
ground-floor plan.
Vanna Venturi House,
living room.
Italian critic Manfredo Tafuri mocked the American avant-garde’s
indulgent pleasures for capitalism’s new elite as ‘architecture in the
boudoir’.33
Some houses, highly acclaimed at the time, are less well known
today. Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty caused a stir with their
1965 housein Lincoln, Massachusetts. Life praised the sensuous
poured-concrete curves as ‘sculpture to live in’. The young husband-
and-wife architects were principally concerned with environmental
factors and an open, non-hierarchical family life. The plan allowed
them to do away with doors, while encouraging a palpable sense of
movement and ‘hesitations’ – their word for places to reflect or inter-
act.34 The design /build firm Jersey Devil connected aesthetic
experimentation with a strong environmentalist purpose, fusing
sophisticated technology with hands-on construction. A nomadic col-
lective, they lived on site throughout each project, deeply committed to
the particularities of place and process, juxtaposing steel and computers
Richard Meier, 
Smith House, Darien,
Connecticut, 1965–7,
living room.
2 1 9 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
with found objects and natural materials. As architect-contractors they
defied the profession’s gentlemanly traditions as much as John Portman
had done.
Frank Gehry’s series of inventive urban dwellings began with the
1977–8 adaptations to his own home in Santa Monica, California.
Neighbours protested, but architects acclaimed the lyrical collages of
raw construction materials like chain-link fencing and rough timber.
Brash gestures were interwoven with poetic references to the original
house (a 1920s builder’s bungalow), the legacy of twentieth-century art
and architecture, and Gehry’s own family memories. While intentionally
modest and slightly aggressive, this house would become an iconic
object when he rose to celebrity status in the 1990s.
Residential architecture of the 1970s challenged conventions while
enhancing design and domestic lives. Most Americans saw only three
extremes: expensive custom-designed houses, distressed public-housing
towers and large-scale multi-unit developments. These were the images
Mary Otis Stevens
and Thomas McNulty,
Stevens-McNulty
House, Lincoln,
Massachusetts, 1965.
2 2 0
Jersey Devil, Hill
House, La Honda,
California, 1977–9. 
Frank Gehry, Gehry
House, Santa Monica,
California, 1977-8,
kitchen.
of ‘Modernism’ when the mid-decade recession and urban-development
policies wreaked havoc on moderate-income housing. A conservative
backlash viewed all of these changes as ‘anti-family’. Even positive trends
took on dark connotations. Local governments granted special zoning
privileges to large, relatively expensive Planned Unit Developments
(puds) with dense configurations of condominiums and ample open
space. Television specials about ‘the housing crisis’ portrayed this as the
necessary if less-than-desirable solution for those who could not afford
‘real’ homes in the suburbs. Identified with economic and social disrup-
tions, even purposefully moderate and ecological modern architecture
came to be seen as an assault on the American way of life.
Marketing an Open Society
The exuberant public spaces of the late 1960s and ’70s promised new kinds
of freedom, some celebrating collective expression, others geared to partic-
ular groups. Presidents Johnson and Nixon invested in modern public
architecture for education and the arts. States and municipalities did the
same, often partnered with private businesses and cultural institutions. As
Americans confronted a rise in urban violence, two seemingly opposite
spatial paradigms defined a new degree of control over ‘free’ environments
and activities. The interior ‘street’ brought the public realm indoors.
Simultaneously, echoing office buildings of the era, exterior plazas of ‘open
rooms’ were designed for surveillance and control as much as pleasure.
Progressive or ‘open’ schools embraced an energetic aesthetic of irreg-
ular clusters, diagonal rotations and animated layers. Spatial liberties
aligned with pedagogical reforms like team-teaching and non-graded
groups. Columbus, Indiana, a town of 40,000 inhabitants, inaugurated a
programme for innovative schools funded by a philanthropic local busi-
nessman, J. Irwin Miller. The utopian mission extended to other building
types as well, making Columbus a virtual museum of modern American
architecture. One of the best examples was Mt Healthy Elementary
School by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer (1970–72). The public façades mixed
references to familiar late nineteenth-century motifs such as industrial
windows and red-brick schoolhouses, although these walls were thin and
playful, like other cardboard motifs of the 1970s. The interior came alive,
a kinetic sculpture with exposed high-tech elements in vivid colours
along a circulation spine with niches, changes in level and moveable par-
titions along a diagonal ‘street’. Learning could be fun and unstructured,
at least for young children. Urban intermediate and high schools, on the
other hand, often resembled another prime architectural motif of the
era, the fortress or prison.
2 2 2
As baby-boomers reached college age, federal programmes expanded
opportunities for higher education. College enrolment soared to over
6 million students in the mid-1960s, four times the post-war figure.
Seeking to mask the increased scale, architects stressed illusions of spon-
taneity, ‘planned chaos’ and community with contrived simulations of
those goals. Student centres proliferated, while large ‘multiversity’ cam-
puses were subdivided into smaller clusters. The architecture tended to
be imperious, even in small schools and historically black colleges like
Tuskegee. som’s Walter Netsch began the move by applying his ‘Field
Theory’ to the new University of Illinois campus at Chicago Circle, com-
pleted in 1965. Elevated concrete ‘expressways’ for pedestrian traffic
surrounded a huge rooftop ‘agora’ above the Brutalist-inspired class-
room buildings.
New York and Massachusetts hired major architects to design out-
sized, often overbearing campuses. California commissioned three new
universities. San Diego and Irvine were huge concrete behemoths, but
Santa Cruz was known for its open-minded teaching and informality,
with each college isolated from the others in lush natural landscapes.
Charles Moore/mltw’s Kresge College (1965–74) was a ‘non-institutional’
alternative designed with student and faculty participation. A pedestri-
an ‘street’ formed the spine of an intimate village, its picturesque
irregularity responding to trees and terrain. If Kresge was easily 
dismissed as a romantic stage set, the firm’s Pembroke Dormitories 
at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1970–75), won
Hardy Holtzman
Pfeiffer, Mt Healthy
Elementary School,
Columbus, Ohio,
1970–72, interior.
Mt Healthy
Elementary School,
floor plan. 
2 2 3 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
resounding praise. Spatial and budgetary restrictions had inspired an
urbane design built around a multi-tiered internal court. The dense
complex engaged the neighbouring streets, even in the choice of glazed
coloured brick, a material simultaneously prosaic and scintillating.
Government architecture displaced the solemn New Monumentality
of post-war modernists on several fronts. When President Johnson’s Great
Society programme funded projects in poor neighbourhoods, ‘community
SOM/Walter Netsch,
University of Illinois,
Chicago Circle 
campus, Chicago,
Illinois, 1962–5, 
central ‘agora’ 
and classroom 
buildings. 
Donlyn Lyndon/MLTW,
Pembroke College,
Brown University,
Providence, Rhode
Island, 1968–70,
courtyard.
2 2 4
control’ encouraged local residents’ involvement in decision-making and
design. Indeed, Johnson himself endorsed ‘maximum feasible participa-
tion’, sometimes as a substitute for new buildings and services. Established
architects’ offices donated their services pro bono; small firms like Friday
Architects of Philadelphia and the all-women Open Design Office in New
York specialized in community centres. These ‘storefront’ facilities com-
bined renovations with new infill buildings to repair tears in the existing
fabric of streets. Drawing on the neutral setsof modern stagecraft, these
architects delighted in the possibilities of recycled and cheap materials.
But the larger political picture shows the omnipresent shadow of the
Vietnam War. Aesthetics had to be affordable in Johnson’s War on Poverty,
in part because the cost of that conflict radically depleted funds for hous-
ing and other reforms. If liberal policy-makers sought to win ‘hearts and
minds’ in the ghettos, they also trained ‘counter-insurgency’ police and
increased the number of armouries and prisons, soon achieving the world’s
highest rate of incarceration.
Expanding federal, state and municipal governments commissioned
larger buildings. Complex massing supposedly encouraged democracy
by revealing the inner workings of power and bureaucracy. The young
firm of Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles won the national competition
for Boston’s City Hall (1962–8), the centrepiece of an extensive new gov-
ernment centre. This was ‘Action Architecture’, in Gerhard Kallmann’s
words, a syncretic mixture of ad hoc events and organized movement.
2 2 5 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Hodgetts and 
Fung with Robert
Mangurian/Studio
Works, Southside
Community Center,
Columbus, Ohio, 1980,
view of courtyard.
A radial plaza conjured up the ‘outdoor rooms’ of Siena and Italian hill
towns, then penetrated into the building through ramps and steps that
implied accessible officials. In fact, the space was rigidly composed yet
disorientating, especially the huge atrium lobby. The Brutalist concrete
suggested a fortified barricade and the weight of authority. No one could
match the protean scale of Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s Empire State
Plaza in New York, also known as the Albany Mall (1969–78), with ten
high-rise buildings atop a six-storey platform and an eerie subterranean
concourse. Grandiose ‘public’ gestures became so ostentatious that an
inevitable reaction set in, evident in ‘contextual’ or colourful new post-
modernist buildings and renovations of historic structures.
Government buildings were mostly a matter of boosterism and
bureaucracy by the 1970s, since private corporations and real-estate
developers now figured prominently in local decision-making. They
convinced officials of two basic principles: first, that urban constituen-
cies were investors and consumers, not citizens; second, that people
thought of cities in terms of imagery and entertainment, not services.
Neo-liberals argued that municipal funds were supposed to keep cities
‘competitive’ and ‘attractive’ with ‘people-magnets’ which would draw
wealthy tourists and residents. The ‘centre’
trumped the mere building. Modern
architecture predominated with new urban
shopping centres, performing-arts centres,
convention centres and arts centres. Spark-
ed by Portman’s Hyatt Hotels, the emerging
‘hospitality industry’ built lavish hotels
alongside the new cultural emporia. Fran-
chise motels and restaurants followed
mediocre formulas, still plastic but lacking
the idiosyncratic camp of earlier ‘Googie’
architecture. By the time Venturi and Scott
Brown published Learning from Las Vegas
in 1972, the neon world of the Strip was
changing. Recent laws allowed corporations
to be licensed as casino owners, resulting in
huge high-rise towers behind lavish special-
effects spectacles.
Fascination with local history sought
to offset the glitz. Even race and ethnicity
were recast as claims about cultural 
‘identity’ morphed inequalities into partic-
ularities that might attract tourists eager
Harry Weese,
Metropolitan
Correctional Center,
Chicago, 1975.
2 2 6
for novelty. Japanese-American merchants
joined with the San Francisco Redevelopment
Center under Rai Okomoto in 1968 to create
Nihonmachi, a cultural and economic centre
for the area called Japantown, a themed com-
plex of shops surrounding a landscaped plaza
and Minoru Yamasaki’s new Peace Pagoda. Los
Angeles sponsored a similar fusion a decade
later at Korean Village. Italian-Americans in
New Orleans hired Charles Moore’s Urban
Innovations Group to design the Piazza d’Italia
(1975), a ‘destination’ that ultimately failed,
largely because the surrounding hotel, stores
and offices never materialized.
A few cities rejected commercialized themed
environments in favour of settings that fused
old and new, building and landscape, com-
monalities and differences. Lawrence Halprin
used dynamic concrete geometries for sculpture
fountains in Portland, San Francisco and Seattle.
These structures invited spontaneous partici-
pation, but they were confrontational too, often built over freeways or
resembling the ruins of freeway extensions that had been stopped by
citizen protests.
One of the most visited national-park sites in the country is the
Martin Luther King Jr Center adjacent to Dr King’s church on Sweet
Auburn Avenue, the center of black Atlanta in its glory days. Plans for
the mlk Center were fraught with tension after the rise of Black Power
and the violent ghetto riots of the late 1960s. These were compounded
by conflicts between federal agencies, the King family, the neighbour-
hood and the city government, all jockeying for cultural capital and
economic benefits. The New York firm Bond Ryder James eventually
won the commission in 1976 and completed it in 1981. The materials are
humble: concrete columns with local wood and brick. The sequence of
spaces repeats familiar patterns as if the complex had evolved over time.
This is an eloquent, understated Modernism, a fitting expression of
King’s aspirations for justice.
For the most part, municipal and regional governments partnered
with private sponsors for extravagant blockbuster facilities. As Charles
Moore said in 1965, fascinated but also saddened by the shift: ‘You Have
To Pay for the Public Life.’35 Aquariums were a big draw. Superstar 
athletes on big-league teams spurred huge sports stadiums, ‘the civic icon
Kallmann, McKinnell
& Knowles, Boston
City Hall and Plaza,
1960–67, Portland
Cement company
advertisement.
2 2 7 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Bond Ryder James &
Associates, Martin
Luther King, Jr Center
for Non-Violent
Social Change,
Atlanta, Georgia,
1976–81.
of the late-20th century’, one architect told the Wall Street Journal, ‘the
equivalent of a cathedral’.36 Early examples of engineering prowess
include Houston’s 1965 Astrodome with its retractable roof, an electronic
scoreboard and surface parking for 30,000 cars. The Louisiana Superdome
and Pontiac Silverdome (both 1975) soon upped the ante. ‘Build It and
They Will Come’ was the mantra. Higher taxes and special bonds were
necessary, but prestige and economic benefits were supposedly guaran-
teed. In fact, most new stadia showed a net loss.
Performing-arts centres provided cultural capital for a new urban
elite that dreaded the thought of being provincial. These places did not
just house culture; they transformed it with mass middle-class audiences
for blockbuster performances. Grandiose scale and opulence certainly
defined the first example, New York City’s Lincoln Center, begun under
Robert Moses in 1955, its initial phase completed in 1966. With Harrison
& Abramowitz only nominal leaders, Philip Johnson took charge of the
master plan, orchestrating the architecture to resemble Michelangelo’s
Campidoglio complex in Rome with repeating colonnades and uniform
roof heights and entries. The extravagant size and gaudy ornamentation
stressed the audience’s performance as much as that of the artists. (The
acoustics in the Philharmonic suffered from its grandiose scale until it
2 2 8
was rebuilt in 1976.) But the Moses approach to urban renewal was the
major problem. Lincoln Center was raised above the streets on a plinth,
conspicuously aloof from the city streets, oblivious to the informal vital-
ity and diversity that are essential to artistic creativity.
Hundreds of cities from coast to coast and deep in the heartland invest-
ed in performance centres. The Kennedy Center in Washington, dc,(1958–64) and the Los Angeles Music Center (1958–67) emulated New
York’s model of safe, sanitized grandiosity. Others opted for bold Brutalist
geometries, while a few chose vibrant, small-scale modern architecture.
John Johansen’s Mummers Theatre in Oklahoma City (1964–70), now the
Stage Center, has brightly coloured concrete boxes suspended vertiginously,
linked by ramped circulation tubes, looking somewhat like a giant
Tinkertoy construction. Johansen called his approach ‘Kinetics’, a very
1960s celebration of joy, change and human energy. His sketch for the
John Johansen,
Mummers Theater,
Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma, 1964–70,
aerial view (today the
Stage Center). 
Mummers Theater,
sketch of section. 
2 2 9 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
building captures the anticipated animation of a bubble diagram. Like the
avant-garde theatre productions performed here, the building embodied
self-conscious improvisation and experimentalism geared to smaller audi-
ences. The intentionally haphazard assembly rejects any visible rules of
composition. Some critics were outraged by the structure’s fragmentation,
yet awkwardness can be a virtue in buildings that encourage artists and
audiences to explore unconventional forms of expression.
The visual arts spilled over into museum practice and architecture.
Artists turned to ‘alternative spaces’ they defined themselves, some of
which became major institutions in their own right. The largest and most
potent is the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where Donald Judd
began to renovate a series of small, spare wood-frame houses and enor-
mous industrial sheds in 1972, later interspersing these with his own
concrete and aluminium boxes to create an elegant enfilade. The appro-
priate setting revealed the theatricality inherent in minimal art, what the
critic Michael Fried called its ‘objecthood’, by emphasizing subtle varia-
tions in light and spatial context.37 Artists likewise preferred Frank
Gehry’s Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles of 1983, a funky indus-
trial warehouse only slightly modified (now the Geffen Contemporary)
to the polished museum by Arata Isozaki that opened in 1986.
The ‘museum industry’ borrowed public-entertainment tactics with
amenities such as shops and restaurants and occasionally great architec-
ture.38 The category expanded to include every possible kind of collection.
Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum (1961–8) grouped three separate troves of
history and natural history in discreet, almost invisible structures beneath
landscaped public terraces. But art museums were top of the line. I. M. Pei’s
huge East Wing expansion of the National Gallery of Art in Washington
(1974–8) asserted authority with commanding geometrical shapes and
blank façades. Richard Meier became master of the genre with the High
Museum in Atlanta (1980–83). Gracefully expanding the interlocking white
planes and curves characteristic of his houses, he created exhilarating spa-
tial experiences as diagonal ramps accentuated the complex play of light,
shadows and movement adjacent to contemplative spaces for viewing art.
The work of Louis Kahn defies easy classification. His Kimbell Museum
in Fort Worth, Texas (1966–72) is inspiring but still, in Kahn’s words,
a ‘friendly home’, since both the architect and the museum’s director,
Richard Brown, wanted an institution that would convey dignity and joy
without intimidation. Kahn achieved this with a graceful complex of six
parallel concrete vaults that shelter an entrance court, enclosed galleries,
garden courts and a stepped reflecting pool. Reaching back to ‘simple
beginnings’, the curvature of the vaults was based on cycloid geometry, an
ancient Mediterranean shape. The vaulting allows gallery spaces to be free
2 3 0
Louis Kahn, Kimbell
Museum, Fort Worth,
Texas, 1966–72.
Kimbell Museum,
upper floor plan. 
Kimbell Museum, 
galleries.
2 3 2
of fixed walls while abundant natural light intensifies the elemental power
of the structure and the open spaces. Daylight spills through openings at
the centre of each vault onto upturned aluminium reflectors, infusing the
travertine interior walls with the ‘luminosity of silver’ against the ‘liquid
stone’ of the concrete.39 Kahn’s ability to imbue Modernism with emotion-
al intensity, functional necessities and ordinary life provides a connector
between diverse, seemingly antagonistic architectural groups.
Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President in 1980 proclaimed ‘The
Second American Revolution’. His administration advocated private eco-
nomic gain and ‘traditional’ values, scuttling any residual social ideals.40
Reagan even removed the solar panels that President Carter had installed
on the White House roof. Tom Wolfe’s simplistic, immensely popular
1981 book captured the mood. From Bauhaus to Our House lampooned
modern architecture as an ‘invasion’ of European ‘princes’ committed to
workers’ housing and subservient Americans intimidated by a ‘colonial
complex’. Whites and Grays alike ‘enunciated suitably obscure theories’ to
revile anything that looked ‘too American, too parochial, and too bour-
geois’. Intellectuals on the left described the same situation with a twist.
The geographer David Harvey argued that the fiscal crisis of the mid-
1970s had driven a frenzied search for enticing display to suggest an open,
pluralistic society. Postmodernism and late Modernism were caught in
the same system, beholden to wealthy investors rather than European
architects. For Harvey, modern architecture had ‘shamelessly sold itself to
the highest bidder without a shred of critical resistance’.41
Shock value was part of the calculated appeal in the polyphonous
‘play’ of contemporary architecture. Philip Johnson cheerfully pro-
claimed: ‘I am a whore’ to a privileged group of colleagues in 1982.
‘I do not believe in principles’, he added for effect, ‘in case you haven’t
noticed’.42 Narcissistic nonchalance became a sign of creative independ-
ence. Important architects were talked about on first-name terms –
Philip, Peter and Bob – since everyone knew who they were (or scurried
to find out). The media and big commissions made architects marketable,
assuring major commissions for the select few. If this attitude liberated
American design processes and forms, it also unmoored architects from
an earlier sense of responsibility.43
No epoch can be reduced to an essence or a facile dichotomy. Cultural
clichés about ‘the architecture of Reaganism’ and facile paeans to ‘hetero-
geneity’ are too one-dimensional, eliding anything that fails to fit the label.
The early 1980s expanded opportunities for women, Asian, Latino and
African-American architects. Some of the best-known works were exqui-
site small buildings, often constructed on restricted budgets. Fay Jones’s
Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas (1979–80), sits atop a
stone base in a wooded glade. Gothic Revival allusions to vaulting as a
forest connect the structure to medieval Christianity, yet the elemental
qualities suggest a deistic worship of nature. So, too, with Maya Lin’s
Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, dc (1982), in which a young
female undergraduate conveyed the power of abstract sculptural form
and inspired connection to the earth. Metaphors resonated deeply,
evoking the land and tectonics, human memories and aspirations.
Eschewing superficial user-friendly iconography as well as hermetic
hubris, this modern architecture reverberated within the discipline and
far beyond it.
Fay Jones,
Thorncrown Chapel,
Eureka Springs,
Arkansas, 1979–80. 
2 3 3 C h a l l e n g i n g O r t h o d ox i e s , 1 9 6 5 – 1 9 8 4
Frank Gehry, Frederick
R. Weisman Art
Museum at the
University of Minne-
sota, Minneapolis,
1990–93, postcard. 
The ‘new economy’ became pre-eminent in the mid-1980s, affecting
almost every aspect of architecture from programmes and façades to the
very nature of the discipline. Delirious spending unleashed a bloated
increase in the scale of consumerobjects including buildings. Affluent
individuals commissioned extravagant houses while global capital helped
finance an interconnected world of mega-projects. Entrepreneurial cities
invested in name-brand architecture as ‘catalysts’, hoping to stimulate a
flow of outside investors, wealthy residents and tourists, including near-
by suburbanites.1 Haphazard development in the suburbs shifted towards
large master-planned enclaves and gated residential communities, also
known as ‘common interest developments’, predominantly neo-tradi-
tional enclaves under the aegis of leviathan home-building corporations
that rarely hired professional architects. The media began to track a
handful of ‘boutique’ or ‘signature’ architects, beginning with Frank
Gehry after he traded the colliding elements in cheap materials of his
earlier buildings for sinuous curves in expensive metals. Through these
years, if only occasionally in the spotlight, hundreds of resilient modern
architects around the country, most in relatively small practices, gener-
ated imaginative designs for workplaces, public buildings and
moderate-income housing.
Networks were essential, given the pace of change and complexity of
knowledge in every field. The nea created the Mayors Institute on City
Design in 1986, bringing mayors and key administrators from more than
200 cities together with designers and academics to discuss local initia-
tives from infrastructure to public housing. The structure of
architectural practice underwent major shifts in the 1990s as large cor-
porate firms merged, spawned regional offices and greatly increased
non-design staff in public relations, construction management and
other business skills. Once reluctant to show conspicuous commercial
ambitions, architects were touting their savvy about real-estate, publici-
ty and communications strategies, some to engage ‘the market’, others to
press beyond its narrow conventions.
c h a p t e r s e v e n
Disjunctures and Alternatives,
1985 to the Present
Computers were soon omnipresent, catapulting architecture far
beyond the previous generation of cad and computer-aided manufac-
ture (cam). Gehry appropriated technologies from the automotive,
naval and aerospace industries, making fluid shapes feasible to build, if
economical only in relative terms. Young architects then adapted 3-d
modelling programmes from movie special effects and animation to
create sinuous surfaces. Greg Lynn called his shapes ‘blobitecture’ and
issued messianic assertions of a liberating new Zeitgeist.2 Every technol-
ogy has its drawbacks, of course. Speed encouraged dramatic imagery
over more deliberative considerations; programmes become design
William Massie, Big
Sky House (Owens
House), near White
Sulpher Springs,
Montana, 1999–2001,
illustrated in
Metropolitan Home
magazine (November
2003).
Digital fabrication
versioning for Big Sky
House. 
2 3 6
determinants rather than tools. Computers forced many architects to
cut time, costs and the quality of materials, thus reducing design stan-
dards. Some cleverly turned the tables, simplifying schemes, then going
directly into production in order to customize moderate-cost buildings
adapted to their sites. William Massie told Business Week that he used
computer technology to go back to ‘the true beginning – when modernist
homes were reasonably priced’.3
The Internet made research a buzzword, providing a base for design
analysis, programs, specifications – and promotional imagery. Reams of
data were compiled into vivid maps and ‘datascapes’, sometimes trans-
lated directly into morphology. Gensler and oma created offshoot
research units to study topics like workplace performance and branding
strategies. Adopting a business model that delivered up-to-date generic
products, more firms specialized in particular kinds of buildings, using
detailed knowledge to reduce costs and maximize profits. Intrepid
designers adopted scientific or management models of innovation,
‘looking for loopholes’ within existent systems. Small offices collaborated
and augmented the range of in-house knowledge, as with New York’s
Sharples Holden Pasquarelli (shop), whose principals combined design
skills with training in fields like financial management, allowing them to
tackle large and small projects in ways that accentuate ‘performance rather
than form’.4
Building skins took on an ethereal lightness of being with advances
that combined thinness, translucency, permeability and environmental
adaptations. Architects were often directly engaged in the development
of ‘ultramaterials’ that met performance criteria never before imagined.5
Structural fibreglass and polymers, foamed aluminium, moiré and mesh
metals, subtle patterned glass and seemingly weightless concrete directly
influenced forms and perceptions. Modernism’s early focus on trans-
parency gave way to more subtle experiments in optical and cognitive
reflection, a process brilliantly deployed by the artist James Carpenter
and architects like Smith-Miller + Hawkinson. In a world obsessed with
illusory images, the attention to precise textures and details in the
Corning Museum of Glass (1995–7) in Corning, New York, renewed a
passion for substance. Equally eloquent advocates took up inexpensive
recycled debris. Fernau & Hartman explored the distinctive patinas and
historical resonance of reused timber with several remarkable houses in
northern California and beyond. Rick Joy juxtaposed rammed earth and
rusted steel in simple cubic forms, a combination chosen for sustainability
as well as sensuality. Others used recycled metal and plastic with aplomb,
while several architects developed a fetish for shipping containers, an
ingenious but scarcely empathetic solution to the housing crisis.
2 3 7 D i s j u n c t u r e s a n d A l t e r n a t i ve s , 1 9 8 5 t o t h e P r e s e n t
Beset by deep-rooted American anxieties about bilingualism,
architects have had to negotiate between competing verbal and visual
languages while surreptitiously borrowing from each other. Neo-
avant-garde discourse continues to call for aggressive transgressions
and defamiliarization. Philip Johnson, still a king-maker at 82, and co-
curator Mark Wigley created a trendy new label with moma’s
Deconstructivist Architecture show (1988), fusing the skewed shapes of
Russian Constructivism with the language games of Jacques Derrida’s
Deconstruction.6 Apart from Gehry, the architects on display had little
or no built work, but their drawings and models had extraordinary
power, especially the pulsing energy of Zaha Hadid, the torqued geome-
tries of Bernard Tschumi and the catastrophic scenarios of Daniel
Libeskind. The catalogue praised these works as subversive assaults on
the status quo, ‘releasing’ the ‘instability’ and ‘impurity’ that the Modern
Movement had sought to repress. These references to revolutionary
change suggested a spread from a fashion magazine more than a politi-
cal manifesto. Indeed, in less than a decade the avant-garde moved on to
Deleuzian folds, then allusions to mathematics with fractals and chaos
theory, followed by biomorphic curves and genetic mutations. Analogies
seem to metamorphose just as critics begin to probe them.
Smith-Miller + 
Hawkinson, Corning
Museum of Glass,
Corning, New York,
1995–7, entry.
2 3 8
Another group rejected alienation by evoking the local, the everyday
and the vernacular.7 The Vernacular Architecture Forum, founded in 1980,
promoted scholarship about ‘ordinary’ American buildings and cultural
landscapes, past and present, not just rural but urban and suburban, too.
Vernacular, originally a linguistic term for parochial dialects about every-
day matters (a contrast to the Latin of scholars and the Church), now
meant designs attuned to local landscapes and construction traditions.8
Some aficionados espoused a romantic primitivism, a pathway to suppos-
edly ‘authentic’ building practices and stable communities in perfect
harmony with their surroundings. Others claimed that